


Tales of Imanara Mediocrity

by Snickie



Category: Naruto
Genre: Background Character Death, Blood, Could Be Canon, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Gen, Jutsu, Mild Language, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV First Person, Possible Character Death, Self-Insert, Slow Build, Tags Are Hard, Until it isn't
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-03-10 09:45:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13499434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickie/pseuds/Snickie
Summary: Kizuna needs a vacation because this respawning business really sucks. The plot, as plots are wont to do, has other plans.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Disclaimer:**  I am not Masashi Kishimoto and as such I do not own  _Naruto_  or any other associated works besides this one, nor do I make any sort of monetary profit by writing and posting fanfiction. If this  _ever_  changes, I will let you know.
> 
> This work is strongly inspired by similar fanfictions. I do not own those stories nor do I own the characters. They do not appear as characters in my story, though I may reference them frequently within the narrative. All original characters are mine and any resemblance to existing other original characters is coincidental.

Two clear paths stretched out in front of me. Well, three, if you count the one I had just come from. But I didn't really want to go back there. You see, that was how I had ended up here. Obviously.

I had an idea of which way I wanted to go, but my muscles were content to stay exactly where I was despite my brain's desperate screaming to  _get up and get the fuck out of here_. Endurance had never been my thing and I cursed my past self for not focusing on it more. And the idiot behind me who had exploded a bottle of smoke and glitter and pelted everyone in sight with what looked like metallic pick-up sticks.

"Your needles must be finely honed so you do not break the weave of your fabric." This statement was the hallmark of a master seamstress, and a concept easily transferred to the usage of certain shinobi weapons. The pieces of steel piercing various points in my body were bigger and sharper than the quilting needles I had known and thinner and sturdier than even the thinnest knitting needle, adhering perfectly to the concept. These were senbon, and if the poison they were laced in didn't kill me first, then it would be either the blood loss or the angry fellows behind me using the blood trail to find me. I was a neutral party who had been dropped into a revolution. I knew I'd be killed on sight, an unfortunate collateral casualty.

Which led me to my next concern: Why hadn't I actually died yet?

I had seen these senbon kill people twice my size in a quarter of the time. Most had died quickly due to the poison, and the ones who had resisted eventually succumbed to blood loss and the revolutionaries who came after the initial explosion to make sure Nobody Survived. To my knowledge, I was the only one to have gotten away. I alone, with my tiny frame and constitution that was more suited for a ragdoll than a human, had managed to escape.

Lying there with my bloody face in the dirt, I had collapsed as soon as I had arrived at the fork. I couldn't even really bring myself to wince as the senbon buried themselves deeper into my flesh. I was sure I had internal bleeding in several places. One had punctured my lung, stealing from my already terrible stamina.

And yet I had made it this far. Surely I could manage to get just a few feet down that one path? I heard the metallic clanking of fighting fast approaching and my tiny spark of resolve turned to urgency as I pushed myself to my feet. But the poison must have finally reached my sense of balance and I found myself unable to stand up straight and somersaulting forward, further serving to make sure the senbon found permanent homes in my dying body and I found myself unable to move at all now. I doubted I could even speak now.

_Well this sucks._

At least now I would be able to see my killer.

No, wait nevermind. Apparently it was time for my eyes to go because everything was blurring together and  _was that a_ unicorn _standing over me?_

"Sorry for the wait, little miss. Technical difficulties... had to yell at these knuckleheads to ... but anyway the respawning mech-"

I gazed up at the unicorn glassily as more and more gibberish poured out its mouth like runny globs of botched sunny-side-up eggs mixed with snotty mucus. Respawning? Ha. I had already respawned once, and I had been thrown into it without fanfare. If the mooks and apathetic superheroes working the respawning mechanisms in wherever-the-heck-they-worked had only just gotten the transitional programming to work after fourteen years, I wondered if I'd have to do it all over again or if I'd be left with a useless briefing and told to carry on. Or worse, wipe my memory ex post facto and leave me to carry on as I was. I wasn't sure how this respawning thing was supposed to work.

I guess it didn't matter. I was dying anyway.

My lips tightened in the corners, and I gave what could be described as half cough, half laugh, half splutter of blood. I saw a spark of light trail into my vision before ramifying into a million paths, rudely shattering my vision and my reality and everything I might have once held dear. At least it was fuzzy, and warm, and I knew if I gave in to it I'd have to face another potentially messy reincarnation.

Maybe this time I'd respawn as a unicorn princess with no more obligation than to make lots of pony friends.

Yeah. That'd be nice.

* * *

#### SOME TEN TO FOURTEEN YEARS PRIOR

For four years I lived in a series of back-to-back dreams that only started resembling coherence and making sense about a year and some months ago, and by that point I had had to toilet train myself, had become practically immune to the cold, had learned an entirely new language, was sufficiently ripped, and knew several different ways to kill people.

I'm also pretty sure I died at some point early on, because I definitely wasn't in Florida anymore and I don't remember leaving. I might have been in Kansas. I had never been to Kansas before, so I didn't really know what it looked like or what it was like to live there. Is Kansas known for eternal winter, folks who can accomplish superhuman feats, gratuitous Japanese, and a rather interesting take on music? No? Only the last of the four? Interesting.

So, probably not Kansas.

Dying also explained why I had this totally foreign, tiny body and why I had spent the first of the past four years figuring out how to move beyond useless flailing and wiggling and not poop all over myself. The eighteen-or-so months following were spent on language acquisition and physical conditioning. As a two-and-a-half-year-old, I was already stronger than I had been in my previous life, and I was already developing my own superpowers. In a way, it seemed only natural that I be thrown in, against mine and my parents' will, with a bunch of miniature future killers.

That's right. Ninja academy. At less-than-three years old. But I'll get to that in a second.

That is, of course, if I really had died. I certainly didn't  _remember_  dying. Or being reborn. Yet here I was, a twenty-something inside the body of a three-year-old (judging by the pudginess of my hands and flatter-than-before chest). And apart from eternal damnation, purgatory, and lying in a coma in a hospital room somewhere in Orlando while someone slipped LSD into my IV drip, I didn't have any other theories. Besides, in my dreams I never had such a foreign body as this one.

I didn't know whether or not to assume that they knew about my apparent reincarnation, and given everyone else's superhuman talents, I couldn't see why I would be so different that they would give me so much special treatment (aside from my two caretakers). If anything, my differences made me less deserving of that treatment than the rest - I had an accent and an awkward rhythm to my speech that wasn't normal even for a kid, but aside from that I had basically taught myself everything that takes most kids years to master as soon as I had the physical coordination and sensory development to do them. I was reading and writing as soon as I could see the characters with my crappy infant vision and could grasp the pencil with my pudgy hands, and I practically toilet-trained myself the moment I could get myself onto the toilet without falling in. I had even apparently gained some semblance of chakra control while manipulating what I originally thought was simply that extra imaginary "limb" I sometimes had in my dreams.

As a former-adult, I made for quite the self-sufficient toddler. Prodigious, even, if you looked at it that way. Even so, it was surprisingly easy to forget that I was still not-quite-three. I was just a disadvantaged, displaced twenty-something. No wonder they thought I needed so much attention.

Still. It was annoying.

* * *

I remember being in class with my "peers", a bunch of bratty five and six-year-olds who decided that, because I was half their age, they had to prove that they were somehow better than me.

"Look what I can do," one would say before drop kicking me into the next room.

I walked out a minute later, nursing my bruises while they laughed. That really hurt. I had learned how to take it though. Egging them on meant dragging the fight into a shouting match about superiority, so showing them I didn't care was my best option. That also pissed them off, of course, but they would eventually leave me alone for the rest of the day when they realized they weren't going to get a rise out of me.

It wasn't like I could tell the instructors, though: they didn't actually want to make sure that a three-year-old (that, need I remind you, was surrendered into the program against the parents' will) was capable of holding her own against the developmentally more advanced six-year-olds that dominated the academy. Naomi-kaa-san raised hell after I came home every day for a month straight covered in bruises. Fortunately Naomi-kaa-san's training and treatments kept me from being seriously injured.

I'd come home, and Naomi-kaa-san would sigh and mutter curses while healing me and shoring up my chakra coils, opening them so I could heal more efficiently I guess. The next day I'd show up at school again, clean of injuries, ready to repeat the whole thing.

Maybe it was at least a  _little_  bit good for me. It did increase my pain tolerance, and in my quest to avoid the daily beatings I came up with ideas for jutsu that I'd have to pursue later, when I knew about jutsu creation. Mostly it was bad. Having to heal all the time meant there was no time for homework and other training, and it may have also stunted my growth a little (God I hoped not).

Naomi-kaa-san was of course livid. She stormed up to the academy headmaster's office one day, in full combat gear, and raised hell. I was left in the hallway outside the door, but I could still hear.

"You know, I like to think I've been reasonable in meeting you fuckers' demands," she started out. "But sending my child, who's too young to be in your program anyway, sending her home beaten to within an inch of her life every single day. How do you figure that builds strong shinobi?"

"If she's too weak to fight back, that's her problem," they said. "She should adapt and get stronger like everyone else."

"You're a dumb motherfucker if you think it's that simple."

"But it is, especially since she's a prodigy. And don't forget that you are refugees in this country. You owe us your lives and your children. She must grow stronger and serve our country and village with all of her talent."

"Fuck you. She's  _three_ ," Naomi-kaa-san spat. Or, at least, I imagined her spitting. "Kizuna needs time to grow up first. Throwing her in with a bunch of children with ego problems and her having almost no formal training is fucking asinine. And if you expect me to supplement her training at home, well, how the fuck am I supposed to do that when I'm always so fucking busy putting her back together?"

"If she can't handle the training, then it's your fault."

"Fuck you. She's not developmentally ready for this. I'm taking her home since  _you_  seem to have no fucking concern for your students' well-being. Besides, Yuki no Kuni isn't involved in the war. It's not like there's a shortage of Yuki-nin right now."

"Well of course you wouldn't understand. You're an outsider. You all are, you couldn't possibly understand village loyalty."

"And you aren't? I seem to remember seeing your profile in a Konoha bingo book saying you originated in Kumogakure, motherfucker."

"I'll get started on your withdrawal paperwork right away, Hamauzu-san."

 _SLAM_. "Good!" A few seconds later the door flew open and Naomi-kaa-san quietly stormed out, took me by the arm, and led me home with a sage "Come on sweetie, let's go."

Well okay. Add that to my list of things to avoid: pissing off Naomi-kaa-san. That woman can be  _scary_.

* * *

Naomi-kaa-san won that battle, but the war was far from over, as evidenced by the butthurt village officials who came by the next day to complete my withdrawal paperwork. In the five seconds I saw them and some of my more fanatical former instructors who knew of my abilities, I got the "I'm watching you" sign language - two fingers pointing at their eyes and then at me. The message was clear: "You'll be back." The paperwork gave me a short buffer of protection, but I suspected there was an appeals process, and I could only hope the bureaucracy here was as slow and inefficient as it was in my original country. Unfortunately, ninja are known for efficiency, so I didn't hope for much.

Imanara Bunshirou-tou-san spent most of the hours in his days working at some technology firm, so Naomi-kaa-san took it upon herself to train me at home. She became what my academy  _should_  have been, splitting up my training into easier, more age-appropriate modules while simultaneously trying to cram every bit of Hamauzu knowledge and techniques into my tiny brain and body.

The Hamauzu style taijutsu was floaty and dancelike, requiring me to always move fluidly. From what I gathered, it was a style more geared toward energy redirection, not unlike what I could remember of airbending techniques from the  _Avatar_  series in my old life. Circles and spirals were integral, and if you didn't master the technique while very young, your body would simply lose the ability to move that way.

Also, being young meant I was more easily bribed with mochi, and that would leave a sizable dent in Tou-san's paycheck, but that's not important now.

Taijutsu was important in case the appeals process took less time than expected and so I could come home with fewer bruises, and maybe inflict some of my own.

The other thing the Hamauzu had down pat was chakra control, and this went well beyond what I remembered in the anime. See, the Hamauzu had this theory of meridians, which were central lines that channeled energy to and from the limbs like winding rivers of chakra, and within those rivers were dams that could be opened and closed, for the most part at will. Knowing which dams to open and close and half-open at a given time and in what order was integral to chakra control as well as the form and nature that the jutsu would take. Most shinobi winged this process through either hand signs or trial and error (though the Hyuga, I suspected, had more control than most due to their Byakugan and juuken) but the Hamauzu had put emphasis into studying how to manipulate the dams consciously within themselves and within others with or without the use of hand signs, making their other jutsu that much more potent.

What Naomi-kaa-san had been doing to me before I had left the academy was to configure the dams in my network such that the iryo-ninjutsu she used would most strongly saturate into my damaged tissue no matter where she physically applied her mystical palm technique. But the technique could be used for all sorts of things.

Yin release, as it turned out, was a prime example. The main meridians complimented each other - for every yin there was a yang and vice versa, which was expected. Through guided meditation I learned I could grasp at the entrance to all of the yang meridians and close them all simultaneously, like closing one fist, and at the same time let go with the other and pull from the open yin meridians, and manifest a strong yin release, taking my imagination with it.

It was spiritually liberating, almost like being on ecstasy (not that I had ever tried ecstasy in either life). I could see possibilities. I wanted to reach out and grab one, but remembering that one fanfiction  _Dreaming of Sunshine_  from that other life and seeing Shikako go completely numb warned me away from that. Maybe when I was much, much older.

It was also emotionally draining and it left me with a headache if I used it for too long. At that point we would stop that for the day, have a bite of mochi, and we'd refocus to calligraphy.

But really. It was  _easy_. Even if it did give me headaches.

What nearly-four-year-old gets to learn the  _spiritual_  release? It was like that one time I astral projected in another dream, though at least these were more favorable circumstances and I wasn't trying to separate my entire consciousness from my body, only my spiritual energy. I suppose I should have thanked my earlier death and previous life experiences for supplying my spiritual energy. But again. What nearly-four-year-old can accomplish yin release and think it's easy?

Me, that's who.

Why?

Because I was a dumb prodigy, of course.

I know I know, thinking I was somehow special in a world full of specials was conceited. Although to be fair, I don't think any of my fellow three-year-olds had a lifetime of memories at their disposal, among which included a detailed map and history (or perhaps it was a forecast, I hadn't quite narrowed down my place in the timeline just yet) of their world. I supposed that was exploitable, but then the only reason to keep me locked away at this point would be because Bunshirou-tou-san and Naomi-kaa-san  _knew_  that I had these memories, and while I was clearly an odd child who picked up concepts seemingly faster than her peers, I had made sure not to let  _that_  particular detail slip. I wondered how they would have worked it out.

Maybe it was my candid dislike of learning such efficient ways to kill people, which manifested as a preference for pretend play and drawing and writing during my downtime (and may have also contributed to my mochi addiction). Maybe it was how I was writing in my native language before I was writing in theirs. Or the spoken accent. They'd've had to have been idiots not to notice that something was off about me.

The academy instructors had definitely noticed.

Both of my parents were home that day in February when they came for me with nasty grins and official notices that I was to report back to the Yukigakure ninja academy immediately, by order of the Snow Village leader and the liaison to the daimyo. To say my parents were displeased would be an understatement of epic proportions. I got to see Naomi-kaa-san's hair float around her dangerously like freaking  _tails_  even though I was clear that she did not possess a biju. Bunshirou-tou-san quickly ushered me away and into my room, but my four-year-old curiosity led me to hide in the hallway after he left. I had missed the opening lines but it was easy to pick up where the conversation had come from.

"You can't have her."

" _Somebody_  is coming with us."

" _Get your hands off of my wife._ "

The atmosphere suddenly filled with… something. It was tense before, but now it was like someone was dismantling an atomic bomb and the countdown had just unexpectedly jumped from ten minutes to ten seconds. I couldn't move, overpowered by the crushing antipathy and heartlessness. But I couldn't crumble to the ground either, strangely buoyant. Or was it static? My body was jelly in a rigid frame.

Whatever it was, it made time stand still and controlled my thoughts such that I could only really contemplate my impending death. I was going to die.  _I was going to die._  I  _w_ _ **a**_ **s** g _o_ _ **i**_ **n** g  _t_ _ **o**_ **d** i _e_ _ **a**_ **b** L _o_ _ **O**_ **d** Y  _p_ _ **A**_ **i** N _f_ _ **u**_ **L-**

The sound of things breaking brought me back to reality. (How long had I been frozen?) I whipped around the corner and found two ninja, the head instructor with a swollen and freshly burnt cheek, on top of Kaa-san, one pressing a kunai to the back of her neck while the second tied up her wrists behind her back, Kaa-san looking practically drained. Tou-san was nearby, attempting to strangle a third with his bare hands. There was fresh blood on the carpet that was puddled and hadn't had time to soak in, and shards of broken trinkets and a few discarded kunai.

Kaa-san's golden eyes locked with mine and she howled. The man in Tou-san's hands crumpled to the ground, unconscious or maybe dead, and he glared murderously at the two on top of Kaa-san. The pinkette shook her head, earning a couple of cuts on the back of her neck by the ninja handling the kunai.

Tou-san whipped around and saw me just as Naomi-kaa-san's pleas echoed.

"Get her out of here! Don't let them have Kizuna! Don't worry about me - just go!"

"Kaa-san!" I wailed.

"Like we'll let that happen," spat one of the ninja, but with the fight Naomi-kaa-san was giving the two of them and their third member being down for the count, they couldn't do anything in the moment.

"We'll be back for you soon," said the second, eyeing me as he finished tying up my mother and began to drag her out the door.

I didn't hear whatever dialogue was exchanged afterwards as my world dimmed and focused on the door through which she was being dragged as a hostage, staining the floors with a trail of blood, glaring at me with wide, fearful golden eyes, her clothes tearing where the ninja wire had cut and the frayed ends catching on the doorframe, pink hair a tangled mess, yelling what I was sure were obscenities. The head instructor with the burnt and bruising face glared at me and then Tou-san on the floor in front of me (when and how did he get there?), shot him a warning message as he gathered his fallen comrade, and left.

The door slammed shut, and the silence that followed was deafening.

After a minute or two of utter blankness, the first instinct that returned to me was to curl up on the couch with a blanket and something small and rectangular, preferably an electronic device with Google Docs, but my calligraphy practice booklet would have been just as good. Unfortunately, Tou-san was still on the ground, and now he was crying ( _stop that_ , dammit, you're making me cry too), so First Instinct was discarded in favor of Second Instinct - help him up.

"Tou-san, get up," I chided, trying not to let my sympathetic crying affect the resolve and force I was trying to insert into my shaky, squeaky, four-year-old voice. Didn't work. I nudged him with my bare foot.

If I weren't such a dense child I would've noticed right away his anguish. Not just for the loss of the woman who had spent four years taking care of me and doubtlessly longer being his other half through whatever their lives had thrown at them. I had noticed and catalogued  _that_ , having had a similar reaction after discovering my short salmon pink tresses and subsequently seeing myself in the mirror for the first time with grey-purple eyes and realizing that I was a completely different person, and would probably never see my parents and friends and cats from my past life ever again.

But later that night as I lay awake in the snow, hours after the ordeal, replaying how I had simply laid on top of the man who was my father, willing him to stop, stop it,  _please stop crying_  until I finally fell asleep, with all our important belongings sealed away in scrolls by the time I woke up an hour later, an onigiri and some mochi shoved in my hands before I was forced to lace up my boots and find my thickest haori and we walked out of the house together for what would be the last time. We were miles away now.

That was when I noticed.

Tou-san wasn't strong enough.

 _I_  wasn't strong enough.

That was when four years of back-to-back dreams ended, and a lifetime of nightmares began.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was originally posted on FFn under my account The Real Snickie on November 6, 2017. It is my first blatant attempt at a self-insert and my first Naruto fic. Since I'm on FFn a lot more than I'm on here, updates here will be slower and probably in chunks depending on how long at a time I forget about this site. If I actually stay on track, expect updates around the first of each month.
> 
> Thanks to GlidingOne for beta-ing and for motivation and keeping me on track! (LIES, she says!)


	2. Chapter 2

Bunshirou knew the lay of the land. To remain in hiding, one  _had_  to know the land and the obvious places to look and the places that enemy shinobi would overlook in their first and second sweeps, but would definitely check out on the third, by which point one would have moved on to a more obvious location they had sweeped before and been previously able to have sworn was completely empty.

It wasn't until we had put a day or two's distance between us and the border of Yuki no Kuni that he dared say anything other than "hide" and "quiet" and "here, eat one of these food pills." And then after that he wouldn't  _stop_  talking as he dumped his entire life story on me as if he expected me to understand and apply it right away. Even more annoying and worrying was that he  _did_  want to make sure I understood.

As one of the few of his clan who had managed to completely master the Imanara hiden jutsu during one of the Great Shinobi Wars, he had been forced into hiding by enemy-nin who wanted him dead for stealing their jutsu (even though he couldn't pass them on) and by his clanmates who had demanded that he pass on everything he knew, his secrets for how he had mastered the jutsu so effectively.

He didn't really have secrets to his skill, he said. The main things that contributed to it were that he practiced a ton within the three basic ninja arts and that, in regards to the hiden jutsu itself, he had gone back in his studies to the notes made by the first generation and spent time attempting to master the related parent techniques. He never did master them, at least not well enough to use them in combat with or without a well-informed support group, but as a result he had a far better understanding of the workings of the Imanara hiden jutsu. This in addition to a solid backing of fundamental skills made him the most effective Imanara in the history of the clan.

After all, without a solid grasp of the basics, how could anyone expect to survive as a shinobi? It was insane and asinine to rely on a single jutsu. That was why so many of their clansmen had fallen.

His clanmates had not much liked that answer. Surely he'd had  _some_ trick that extended beyond hard work and determination.

Furthermore, Bunshirou had had no silly dreams of grandeur, and, as he was not heir to the clan, he felt no obligation to throw his life away on an unreachable goal, especially when the rest of the Imanara were so deluded about the world and their ranking in it. See, the clan heir believed that the Imanara were on the same level as the Uchiha with their Sharingan, which not only indicated overconfidence in their own abilities but also a gross misunderstanding of what the Sharingan actually did as well as how formidable the Uchiha were even without their dojutsu. Somewhere along the line, a legend had even sprung up about how Natsuki, of the early second generation and in Bunshirou's direct line of ancestry, had managed to steal a Sharingan with the technique.

Dissatisfied with his answer and lack of enthusiasm for clan expansionism, the clan heir had rallied together the council (which I gathered was more of a clique) and the most ornery and senile of the elders to confront Bunshirou, but Bunshirou had already run for his life from his clan. Over the years as he moved further and further away from the western mainland he had heard rumors of the clan being scattered into remnant factions that none of the Five Great Nations would accept as part of their shinobi villages, and the few that did make it in barely got by in each village's genin corps.

These were the gist of the stories Bunshirou told me during our long treks through the snowy mountains of northwest Kaminari no Kuni, Lightning Country. It took nearly a month to get through all the tales of Imanara mediocrity and death and "it's such a shame that a once intelligent people was reduced to this so easily" and vows to keep me safe from the curse of pride.

Of course, it was obvious I already wasn't safe. I'd proven not to be mediocre and thus had already been targeted by Yuki-nin, which was annoying as all get-out because, if they had any shinobi allies in other countries, I had a painted target on pretty pink head.

I just had to maintain a careful lack of complacency and pride.

Frankly though, I think having Hamauzu blood in my system both helped and didn't help matters very much.I had the basic chakra control mastery of a genin already, and Naomi-kaa-san was a  _proud_  woman.

But I had to question Bunshirou's parenting skills in that he was entrusting all of this information to his four-year-old child, whom he had barely even gotten to know while being at work for so many hours, who had just suffered the trauma of losing her mother. Outwardly intelligent or not, four-year-olds should not be subject to that kind of talk. Heck, twenty-somethings shouldn't be subject to that kind of talk. Then again, this was the Narutoverse and not my old world, and social courtesies were different. For example, I was still getting used to the rules of bowing etiquette and not using polite speech all the time.

At least it was informative. I would know what mistakes not to make. The goal of every parent – for their children to learn from their parents' mistakes without having to make them personally.

Though I might have scared him with the scrolls of horrific sketches that I used to make sure I understood exactly what he wanted me to understand, each underlined with to him what must have been a string of English hieroglyphics all because of the language barrier that  _still_  persisted. But he trusted me, and he was patient even though we could have been spotted by enemy ninja at any time. This was Kaminari no Kuni, after all. Bunshirou said he didn't know of any relatives who had settled into Kumogakure no Sato, but he still didn't want to take the chance that there were or that he'd be sent out on a mission against one of them.

So that was how we tried to bypass Kumo at the end of the month. The snow and storms disappeared and the mountains grew shorter as they moved underwater, the water rising to lap at the bottoms of cliff faces.

It was also how I ended up with the worst pneumonia of either of my lives because Tou-san thought that was the time to teach me water walking even though I didn't know tree walking yet. I did master it easily enough, but that's beside the point.

* * *

"We must resume your training," Bunshirou said after a month of walking and boredom and silence other than thirty-one volumes of  _Tales of Imanara Mediocrity_  human audiobook and hurried instructions to suppress my chakra, which I wasn't good at yet.

"Oh. Okay," I replied.

I didn't know whether to be excited or nervous. I had never trained with Tou-san before - he was always working and so that had been Naomi-kaa-san's job. Frankly, I barely even knew the man at all, aside from the mysterious persona he kept up, always getting home late at night, mumbling about things I didn't understand, taking his tea and going to bed past my bedtime and being gone before I was awake. And now Bunshirou the lecturer as well. And then there were Naomi-kaa-san's goo-goo tirades between lessons that were too mushy and perhaps a bit too adult for me to be comfortable recounting as a four-year-old. (Shinobi academy wasn't developmentally appropriate, but romance was? Come  _on_ , Naomi-kaa-san!)

Where were we?

Oh yeah.

I settled for nervous.

"I don't know what all your mother has taught you, but I know she hasn't taught you this and you haven't needed it up until now."

I stood there, trying to guess what it was I was going to need now. We hadn't met anybody on our journey so it probably wasn't combat related. It was probably travel related.

"We're about to pass west of Kumogakure no Sato, and I can't carry you the whole way, so you're going to learn water walking."

Ah, that was it. I had noticed the growing presence of water, which up until very recently had had frozen icy surfaces, but I thought we'd gone further than that by now. I chalked it up to Tou-san having to travel slowly to make up for my tiny, slightly-faster-than-civilian-four-year-old travelling speed.

"Hold on," I said, my spidey senses tingling. "Aren't I supposed to learn tree climbing first?"

"How do you know what that is?"

Episodes from the Land of Waves Arc in that one show in my previous life where tree climbing somehow enabled three wet-behind-the-ears genin to defeat two A-rank shinobi, one with a formidable kekkei genkai, even though two of those genin (guess who) did receive absurd power boosts in the middle of the fight.

"Uh… Yukigakure no Academy?"

Definitely not Yuki Academy. Also, I'm pretty sure my grammar was off there. Also no thanks to Yuki Academy.

Bunshirou shook his head. "Normally yes, but there are no trees here and you'll basically be able to do that too once you master water walking."

I raised a brow. (Thank God I was still able to do that. I couldn't imagine a life where my left eyebrow only went up at the same time as my right eyebrow. How else was I supposed to silently yet clearly communicate my questioning of their words, motives, and everything about them?)

"Basically?" I asked.

He ignored my question and took my hands, turning me around so my back was to him and leading me toward the water.

"What you do is create a cushion of chakra on the soles of your feet and use it to keep from sinking into the water."

He raised my arms and I felt his chakra somehow go through my body, pooling in my feet. Together we stepped out onto the water, and with whatever technique he was using, stayed perfectly atop the surface. We didn't even make a ripple.

"Like so."

We stepped off the water back onto solid land, and the chakra flow stopped as he dropped my hands. "Do you think you can do that?"

I shook my head and struggled not to let my jaw shatter on the rocks below my feet and lose the pieces in the water nearby. "What did you just  _do?_  How did you do  _that?_ " I didn't even have words for what exactly he had done. "I want to learn  _that_."

Bunshirou repeated his question. "Do you think you can walk on the water like we did just now?"

I was starting to get annoyed with his always trying to stay on topic. He was getting annoyed with my wanting to stray off to more interesting things or the one conflict in his words. I pouted a little and allowed him to win this battle.

"...Maybe."

 _No_.

My face screwed up into concentration as I built up chakra and sent it into my feet.

And stepped out onto the water.

And propelled myself several feet out into the frigid water.

"Ah," he said, shaking his head as mine resurfaced and I swam back to the shore, a sliver of thankful that I remembered how to swim and the rest cranky because I was freaking  _cold_. I thought living in Snow Country had fixed that for me but I guess not. Then again, cold air didn't have the penetrative power that cold water did, and not once had I been submerged in a frigid body of water up to that point.

"Outputting too much chakra will do that to you," he continued once I was no longer splashing my way out of the water and over his words.

I filed that somewhere far away as I focused on expelling the water from my sinuses.

"Try again?" he offered.

I glared at him, but got up anyway and built up my chakra again. This time I didn't amass so much in my feet, which was relatively easy to do since the blood vessels and chakra coils around them had constricted trying to keep my core warm. I stepped onto the water.

And sank in up to mid-thigh.

I caught a surface. I shuffled a little and noticed it wasn't rock. That had to be progress, right?

"Not enough chakra," he said unhelpfully. "Try using a little bit more."

I tried shunting more chakra into my feet to push them toward the surface, but my feet were numb now, and I ended up overcompensating and flinging myself further out into the water.

My return to the shore was quicker this time, using the too-much-chakra technique I had just accidentally learned to jet fuel my body back to shore. I filed that idea in the back of my mind for future reference.

Tou-san caught me, chuckling nervously as he hugged me with a freshly unsealed towel. It was also cold, but at least it was dry.

"Can we not?" I asked.

He nodded. "We'll do this again tomorrow."

All in all, it wasn't…  _terrible_ … training with Tou-san. I think.

* * *

I finally mastered standing and shuffling on the water - never fully picking up my feet and thus never fully shifting my weight - after a few days, and shortly afterward I felt my energy simply drain like sludge into the water I was learning to fully walk on.

I was sure it wasn't chakra exhaustion, or my technique would have broken.

I just felt a very very strong urge to take a nap. For five years.

* * *

"Kizuna-chan, what's wrong?" Bunshirou-tou-san asked after I gave up training early for the third day in a row.

"I think I'm sick," I said as I plopped down onto the water. I had been operating on chakra reserves rather than my physical stamina for the past two days, so now I was toeing the line of chakra exhaustion in addition to physical exhaustion.

Tou-san was on me in an instant, a piece of paper with a kanji I didn't recognize glowing green over his right eye. He eyed me through it, and sighed.

I didn't like that sigh.

I found myself on my back on a rock while he kneeled next to me, funneling the unmistakable green chakra of the Mystical Palm Technique into my system. Who knew Tou-san knew iryo-ninjutsu? Not I, said the Kizuna.

Didn't work. Actually I think I got worse. The next day I was coughing up a storm and the shivering was worse than my average everyday walking-through-and-sleeping-in-a-mountain-range-nonstop-in-winter shivering.

Training stopped, but travel didn't. Each day I woke up worse and would be subjected to more healing chakra, and then we'd press on.

* * *

"Take me to Kumo," I wheezed, barely able to take in enough air to say all of that in one breath, beginning to parrot the conversation we had had yesterday about the matter. And the day before. And the two days before that.

"No," he insisted, the glow of his healing jutsu pressed against my chest.

For all his (informed) skill in the basic ninja arts, he actually had very little in his iryo-ninjutsu and he might have actually been making me worse. I thought it was a miracle I was getting any air at all. And was my fever ever this high before? I wasn't even cold anymore. I ached all over. Lifting my head to cough was becoming too much of an effort, especially when coughing itself now included the sensation of being stabbed in the throat and chest with a cursed Morgul blade.

How did he expect my four-year-old body to cope with this much longer?

"Tou-san—" wheeze "—I can't breathe." Wheeze. "My head feels like—" wheeze "—it's gonna implode." Wheeze. "I wanna see—" wheeze "—a real healer." Wheeze. Cough cough hack hack hack HAGHGH HAGAHGAH ouch hurt ouch hurt HAGGHGHGAHG HAGHAG ow ow ow stop it, stop coughing, suppress the reflex suppress it hack hack ow ow suppress it stop it hurt pain oh no don't laugh don't cough resist the urge. Wheeze. "I wanna go to Kumo!"

"And what if someone recognizes us?" he cried, tears filling his violet eyes. "What if they kill you anyway?"

I groaned. "Gonna die anyway," I mumbled painfully. Why was he trying to reason with a four-year-old? Especially when my innards were so cooked from fever and oxygen-starved due to the amount of fluid in my lungs that I probably wasn't actually capable of thinking straight anyway.

"Don't ever say that!"

"Whatever," I murmured, letting myself fall slack on the rock bed. My head was so heavy. It hurt my neck to keep it held up to keep arguing with him. Everything was too heavy and it was too much effort to curl up in on myself. But lying flat only further restricted my breathing, and my chest rattled every time I tried to suck in air.

"Damn it," he whispered, and I knew I had finally won. He scooped up my numb body in his warm arms, an anchor in a sea of cold. I let myself drift.

* * *

The nightmares weren't any better than reality. I dreamed of my old life, but I was in bed, alone and paralyzed in a strange place, with pinching pains I couldn't explain in my hands and elbows, almost like snake bites except I had never actually been bitten by snakes so maybe not. Incessant beeping faded in and out of my perception as a masked man came in and groped my old body, which was no longer familiar to me. At least it was warm here, and I could breathe.

Holy crap, I could breathe again!

The sudden intrusion of air into my lungs startled me to wakefulness, and I found myself in a brightly window-lit room on a gurney, the headboard tilted so I was somewhat sitting up, and a C-shaped pillow-like thing was around my neck. An IV cannula was taped to the back of my hand, a mask was strapped to my tiny face, and I was no longer a trillion degrees feverish. As the world came back into focus, I saw Tou-san slouched over in a chair across the room, probably asleep. His glasses were folded on the side table and his mouse-brown hair was in dire need of a comb. It looked like he had been there for a while.

It was midday now, but with my inability to move due to all the tubing around me and nobody rushing to come see me, there was little point in staying awake.

When I awoke again, my mask was gone, a nasal cannula in its place, and a masked iryo-nin was pressing green chakra into my system. I had never felt anything like it. In addition to the almost numbing, soothing effects of it, I thought I could also feel the mucous lining in my airways being scraped clean, as if by a ton of tiny industrial-strength scrub brushes, and gathering mucus and fluids into a ball just below my gag point. It was getting difficult to breathe around the ball forming there, but that was quickly alleviated with a sudden tug that pulled the loogey out of my airway and out of my body like a projectile. I coughed violently afterwards as the iryo-nin pounded on my back, the yet-untreated pleurisy in my chest making it doubly painful and forcing me to stop while grasping at my chest to mitigate the pain. Had they done this to me before? I was glad I had been asleep then.

"Oh, you're awake," she said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Tou-san perk up his head a little as my head tilted upward to get a better look at the iryo-nin. "Don't worry, little girl. We'll have you good as new in no time!"

I blinked. "'Kay."

I could feel the next round of mystical palm technique soothing the inflammation of my pleurisy, and I felt myself grow sleepy again from the sheer energy requirement of healing. That or more drugs were being pumped into my system. I wasn't really sure. Either way I was on a one-way train back to dreamland.

* * *

I woke up again in the late evening, judging by the dim amber lighting in the room and the position of the moon outside my window. Bunshirou-tou-san was in a chair next to me, hunched over. His elbows were perched on his knees and he was resting his forehead on his interlaced fingers, presumably staring down at the tile floor.

I could also hear purring that I hadn't heard before.

I knew I had been dreaming of at least one of my old life cats, but I knew better than to think that the sounds from that had bled over into my waking self. Or maybe I was still asleep and having a guilty dream.

I reached up and poked my cheek, digging in my stubby nail to the point of pain but not the point of bleeding or of making an indent that would last longer than a few minutes. Sure enough, the slight pain from that action felt very real.

So where the heck was that sound coming from?

"I'm sorry," I heard whispered beside me, distracting me from the purring. "I'm so sorry, Kizuna."

My shuffling must have alerted Bunshirou-tou-san to my being awake because he hadn't moved and was speaking.

"I never should have let you get so bad. It's all my fault."

"Tou-san…"

"We're going to learn iryo-ninjutsu," he continued, as if I hadn't spoken. "Both of us. And  _real_  iryo-ninjutsu. We'll never have to visit a hospital again."

He finally lifted his head to look at me, his eyes swollen and red and face wet from crying. I stared back at him blankly. He suddenly laughed softly and pathetically as he looked back down.

"Ah ha ha ha, I can't do anything without your mother."

I withdrew my gaze and attention, no longer interested in his continuing pained ramblings. I stared at my hands on my lap and lost myself again to the sound of purring in my ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bear with me and various changes as I get used to the format of this site.
> 
> Also, I'm aiming for longer chapters. I guess that'll have to be something I work up to since I haven't written fanfic in a while (relatively speaking) and have never before managed to write to a schedule.


	3. Chapter 3

The air was still purring when I woke up the next morning to my attending iryo-nin wanting to poke and prod at me with various tools and iryo-ninjutsu.  _What was her name again?_

She laughed, a merry jingling sound that tried to wipe away all my trust issues, as she prepared a swab. "Oh, I guess you missed it when I introduced myself, poor thing. You were in such a sorry state of course you wouldn't remember it. I'm Mijikai. Tilt your head back for me please."

_...Did I say that out loud?_

She nodded, and I complied with her request, and immediately regretted it when she moved my cannula and stuck the swab up my nose, further up than anything is ever supposed to go, and dug around my sinuses. I tried not to let my eyes water but to no avail and sort of just whined in annoyance instead. That was a little kid thing to do, right?

No, I totally remembered doing that in my old life too. Whining about this, even as an adult, was perfectly socially acceptable.

Mijikai-sensei (that was the right honorific to use for a doctor, right?) offered no consolations during the task, but eventually the torture stopped. She left to run tests on the swab I guess, throwing praises at my good behavior over her shoulder. Good behavior my foot. I wanted to mutter profanities but that would give me away, so I had to settle for grumbling. Could pneumonia pathogens even be found in the sinuses? I didn't recall having any nasal symptoms while I had been sick. I hoped there was a good reason for what she had done.

Tou-san was asleep in his chair, so I sat and stared at my hands for a bit, poking and tracing the few meridian lines in my fingers that I knew exactly where they were located, trying to restart my chakra circulation without disturbing the needle in the back of my hand. I could feel it had grown somewhat stagnant from prolonged sitting other than the occasional healing session to stir it up. My mind supplied a distant comparison to the lymphatic system, which is stimulated by movement, but moving still wasn't too plausible at the moment. The oxygen tubes in my nose and taped to my face and connected to the wall made sure of that. Mijikai wouldn't even let me out of bed to use the bathroom and I had been using a bedpan when I wasn't comatose and catheterized. Talk about humiliating.

I was feeling mostly better already, though still a little down on my energy. But I could definitely get up and walk around like a well human if I wasn't taped down to my bed. I knew somewhere from previous times that medic-nin preferred their patients remain utterly still and bedridden while in the hospital.

Okay, I get it. Rest is important for recovery.

But lying down not moving for too long was also bad. I had known someone in that other life who had lost the ability to walk because the doctors kept him in bed for three months straight because he was having grand mal seizures and the hospital staff were afraid he would fall and hurt himself if he tried to walk. As a result, the muscles of his legs had atrophied from disuse to the point of being completely useless and he had relied on a fancy electric wheelchair to get around.

(He got better after a  _long_  time and a successful run with some experimental drug. But still.)

Of course, I was nowhere near that point, and this four-year-old body retained a lot of plasticity and recovery potential. And who knows if Tou-san had done some physical therapy on me while I was under the way Asuna's rich family had paid to have done in that one show from that other life.

But still.

I hung my head a little, slightly overwhelmed by the flush of angry and distantly familiar feelings, antagonizing the existing healthcare system and processes, for prioritizing symptom relief over eliminating the cause of the symptom, and when they  _did_  work to eliminate the cause, taking care that the method of cause elimination didn't cause a whole new set of problems like how the vaccine industry had failed to do in That Other Life.

Plus there was the risk of deep vein thrombosis which was why people sometimes died after long, uneventful flights, usually international ones.

Maybe Tou-san was onto something with his snivelling and his vow to learn proper iryo-ninjutsu.

Not that I wanted to become another Mon Kasa. I already had the 'missing possibly dead mother likely from Uzushiogakure' (come on, where else could the "uzu" in "Hamauzu" have come from?) and the 'born and raised under an oppressive regime' parts down. Though I think I was safe from becoming a copy based on the fact that Kasa was a suicidal person playing a game and defying anyone who dare threatened her, even if the split personality had taken a lot of the credit for that. I had far too much survival instinct and had yet to defy anybody on my own, even my own bullies.

I ripped the tape off my face, removed the cannula from my nose, and reached up to grab the IV bag, draping it and all the tubing over my shoulder so I could get out of bed and go to the bathroom.

In retrospect, I didn't think that over too well. Doing anything with my hands - messing with clothes, using toilet paper, washing my hands - when one had a needle stuck in the back of it was hard. Replacing everything - IV bag, cannula, tape, blankets - without waking Tou-san was hard. Despite my defiance of the no-getting-up rule implied by the tape, I had intended to make it look like I had never left. Then Mijikai came back and noticed the state of the tape, and gave me a tongue lashing that put the fear of God in me and in Tou-san. This time she tied me down with rope, and I was going to  _stay in bed, dammit!_

Lesson: Never question the status quo of medical procedures when you're four.

Even rest and recovery protocol.

And vaccines I guess.

(To this day, I still question the necessity for a flu test when it was clear that I did  _not_  have the flu.)

* * *

Well what do you know. Maybe Mijikai did know what she was talking about. I just woke up from how many hours of sleep? Thirty? Anyway. It worked. I think. And it didn't hurt to breathe.

_And_  I didn't lose my ability to walk.

I guess rest and recovery  _are_  good for me, short-term at least.

(Don't expect me to do a hundred jumping jacks or be running circles while water walking though.)

* * *

"Hallelujah, half-real food!" I cried as I practically ran to the hospital cafeteria, dragging my IV pole along behind me, ignoring how the line tugged sharply at the skin under the tape holding the cannula in place. I had energy. I had excitement. I even had enthusiasm, and yes, those are all different. This is what four-year-old children are supposed to act like.

I don't know what they had fed me while I was sick, or how (I wasn't keen on learning  _how_ ), but Mijikai had  _finally_  freed me from compulsory bedrest and I was more than ready to sink my teeth into something delicious again.

I scurried up to the cafeteria window, the IV pole almost-but-not-quite slamming into the counter in my failure to stop it, and stood on my tiptoes to see what was in there. Rice, fish of all sorts, seaweed salad, mushrooms, other vegetables, miso soup, ramen. All being prepared fresh. I counted the coins in my left hand that Tou-san had given me, laid them on the counter, and pointed at what I wanted.

Some minutes later at my table, someone brought me a fresh, steaming bowl of ramen topped with bamboo shoots, squid, mushrooms, pieces of nori seaweed, pieces of pickled something, and a naruto fishcake.

(Of course I was getting the fishcake. It was what the series had been named after, after all.)

I broke my chopsticks, grinned hugely, cried, "Itadakimasu!" and dug in.

"Not so fast, Kizuna-chan," Tou-san chided me lightly, picking at his salad.

I ignored him and continued to fill my hungry little mouth with the sheer deliciousness that was this soup. Oh my god, I don't think I'd ever had ramen that tasted as good as that soup. It was almost as good as I remembered pho being, if I had ever decided to get all seafood toppings instead of beef. I picked up the bowl and slurped up the last of the salty broth until there was nothing left.

"Gochisousama!" I cried triumphantly, replacing the bowl on the table. "Tou-san, more please!"

"Honey, this is  _hospital_  food."

"I don't care, it's good and I want more."

"How can you still be hungry? That was a big bowl."

I folded my arms and stared at him seriously, sticking out my lower lip slightly for that cuteness factor. "Did I say anything about being  _hungry_?"

Tou-san laughed.  _Holy shit, Tou-san was laughing_. Not nervously chuckling. Not a forced reassurance. This was real and maybe a bit terrifying because I had never heard him just cut loose and openly  _laugh_  before.

The horror he must have seen cross my face made him laugh harder. He grabbed and held me against himself.

That was also new.

"Tou-san!" I whined, pushing him away but not really trying. "Let go of me!"

But he was deep into the heartwarming family bonding. I gave up my not-struggle and patted him gingerly as he continued to hug me and guffaw into my shoulder.

(He did eventually let go, and I got to enjoy my second bowl of ramen. Pork and associated vegetables this time. It was also delicious.)

(I also spent half an hour in the bathroom later, my young gut unable to handle all of the salt, especially after having not eaten real food in so long. I maintained to Bunshirou-tou-san that the ramen had been worth it though, and urged him not to utter a single word about it to Mijikai.)

* * *

"But I don't  _want_  to travel anymore," I whined. "Can't we just stay here?"

Mijikai had just delivered discharge papers. I didn't need to know the squiggles of kanji on that paper to know that that's what they were. She had also removed my IV, which I took was a clear message to "go home." Not that I had one to go to, but she didn't need to know that.

"No, Kizuna-chan," Bunshirou-tou-san replied, unamused by my protest.

I pouted. "But I'm tired of walking all the time. And here I have a bed! Like at home!"

Tou-san's face fell a little. "Honey, that's a  _hospital_  bed. It's for sick people. You're not sick anymore."

"So?"

"Besides, we're shinobi," he whispered. "We can't live here. Kumo would never accept us."

"I'm four," I countered. "I have plenty of time to learn how to be a civilian."

And it wouldn't have been  _totally_  awful. I was less likely to die that way, at least.

"We have clan heritage," he said, "and you already know how to water walk. Your chakra coils are already too well developed to really pass as a civilian, and so are mine. There's no way we'd be allowed to live here as civilians."

"Okay, fine, we can never be civilians because we have shinobi clan heritage or whatever." I folded my arms. "What about the food?"

Tou-san put his hands on his hips with almost as much sass as I remember Kakashi having in the anime from that other life, which was about a third of the sass I had ever seen from Naomi-kaa-san. Basically it was the most personality I had ever seen him with. "Are you saying my cooking is bad?"

"No, but I really really like the ramen here," I said. "Can  _you_ make ramen?"

He laughed. "I'll do my best."

"Okay, Tou-san," I conceded, lowering my head. It was never a real argument. I didn't have it in me to openly contradict him. I was only doing it for the sake of getting better perks.

"But not every day. We need to make up for lost time," he added, growing serious again.

"What do you mean?" I asked. "How long have we been here? And where are we going anyway?"

"It's been over two weeks, Kizuna."

I did the math in my head. I had first woken up on a Friday and today, the day of my discharge, was Wednesday. So that was six days right there. But when had I passed out before then? I thought it was a Tuesday. I could understand being out for a few days, but for a week and a half?

I looked up at him seriously. "Why was I out for so long? And how, anyway?"

"You won't understand."

"Tell me anyway." When he hesitated, I added, "We're becoming iryo-nin, right?"

Bunshirou adjusted his glasses and took a deep breath. "Do you know what war is?"

I nodded, ignoring that growing petulant voice in my head that I didn't need to be coddled like a little kid even though I clearly (physically) was. And at least kid language meant I could probably understand it.

"Well Kumo is at war with a lot of other people, and when I brought you here there were many Kumo-nin who needed help right away. But they still wanted to take care of you, so they put you into a deep sleep until all the hurt Kumo-nin were better and someone could pay attention to you."

Translation: Injured Kumo-nin were more important to the Kumo hospital staff than I was, and so during triage they put me into a medically induced coma stasis state until they weren't too busy to actually have a look at me. (And they probably charged Bunshirou for all that time I had been under while nobody paid attention to me.)

I nodded again, understandingly. Grimly. I felt the last dregs of the childlike enthusiasm I had displayed before wisp away like dust in the wind.

It was true, I wasn't thrilled to be moving on. Sleeping on the ground had gotten old quickly, as did the food pills once our bulkier rations had run out. And I really did miss having a place to come home to.

But I understood that we needed to move on.

To wherever the heck we were going.

* * *

It wasn't terribly far from Kumogakure to the border with the Land of Frost. And it was quite obvious when we did arrive.

The steep crags I had become accustomed to seeing in Kaminari no Kuni immediately gave way to flat land and what looked like tundra. Every here and there I could also see bits of grass and scraggly trees struggling to poke through the top layer of permafrost. Even the sky, as few clouds as there were, looked like it was struggling to be blue and not a cold, steely gray.

The change in climate was equally jarring. Kaminari no Kuni had been slowly warming up as spring lazily meandered in, but all that backtracked in Shimo no Kuni. It was freezing again, and stupidly dry, and I cursed whoever had designed this world.

I had already dealt with four and a half years of non-stop cold, after spending an entire lifetime in a place where in some years the temperature didn't drop below freezing even once, even in February.

Sure, I could handle it now, but that didn't mean I wanted to.

Bunshirou only trained me as far as making sure I could still water walk and still had the flexibility to utilize the Hamauzu taijutsu. We couldn't do more than that. It was too cold, and there were too many shinobi lurking around. At least the trees were starting to thicken, the landscape becoming less tundra and more taiga.

Our third day into Shimo no Kuni, a clash broke out. Bunshirou shushed me and carried me into the trees, hiding far enough away that we probably wouldn't be associated with either village but close enough that we could hear shouts and clangs of metal and the ongoing ring of who knows what, and close enough that I could see, not that I wanted to. There we hid as the battle played out in gory, graphic glory.

We walked around the area after the fighting cleared, him physically inspecting the bodies strewn about. It was eerily silent except for our footsteps on the disturbed gravel. I recognized hitai-ates from Kumogakure and Konohagakure. I hoped nobody important to the plot had been killed.

(Not that the others weren't important at all, but if I was to have even a small measure of predictability in this world for survival, I needed things to play out as they did in canon.)

"Look here, Kizuna," Bunshirou said. I trotted obediently over to him, taking care not to step on anything or get blood on my feet. He was kneeling over someone. This one's hitai-ate was missing and he was wearing combat gear in a style unfamiliar to me. Besides that, he was covered in blood. I couldn't make out hair color for all the drying blood obscuring its roots. (It was probably brown. Mooks, especially Japanese animation mooks, were usually brunette.)

I fully expected a lecture about the dangers of being a Village shinobi like one of the ones he had given during our trek through Kaminari no Kuni. But it never came. One look at him and I knew this was something completely different.

"This one's still alive, for the moment," he said, and something dropped inside me. Shouldn't we get help for him? Save him somehow? Bunshirou-tou-san's iryo-ninjutsu was mediocre at best, but maybe it would be enough to get the guy to a more experienced medic?

"Watch," he continued as if I wasn't internally trying to come up with a way to heal the unconscious man.

I watched with morbid fascination as chakra pooled into Bunshirou's fingertips and he pressed them purposefully to non-bloodied parts of the man's face Vulcan mind meld style. The contact was brief, maybe three seconds though it felt like forever, and then he pulled away, formed a few hand signs, and executed a flashy  _raiton_ , a lightning release jutsu.

"Lucky," he said. "Lightning is my affinity."

"Tou-san, what is this?" I asked.

"Ah yes. This was a demonstration of the Imanara hiden jutsu."

"...What?"

He tilted his head at me. "You don't understand?"

I shook my head. "What'd you actually do?"

He shook his head. "And after everything I've told you over the past month."

"All I know is why we're hated and useless for having the jutsu. You didn't actually tell me anything  _about_  it." They were  _Tales of Imanara Mediocrity_ , after all, not a manual on every jutsu the Imanara supposedly knew.

"I copied his jutsu," Bunshirou said.

"How?" I asked.

"You're not ready to learn the mechanics yet, but I basically used my chakra to create an impression of his recent chakra flow, which I now possess as if it were my own jutsu."

"So like carbon copy paper and those old credit card slider things," I noted.

"Like what?"

"Nothing. What about the guy?" I said, indicating the dying shinobi.

Bunshirou's gaze darkened, and he tilted his head so that, intentionally or not, the light reflected off of his glasses and obscured his eyes. "There's nothing we can do for him now."

I felt a chill as the cold of the stagnating air and of his hanging words hit me harder than before. I regretted that we had been forced to shed my travel haori at the hospital, and Bunshirou hadn't seen a need to replace it.

We left the scene. The chill followed.


	4. Chapter 4

The change in climate between Shimo no Kuni and Yu no Kuni was even more jarring than the change in climate between Shimo and Kaminari.

Sure, the land  _ looked _ exactly the same - the area around the border was dominated by evergreen forests, carpeted by their fallen needles and fallen shinobi and the occasional pile of the last remnants of a late April snowfall, perhaps fewer in number and less in amount than in Shimo, but the fact remained. It may have been spring, but winter wasn’t over yet.

The wall of heat and humidity and the squishier ground beneath the pine needles and dead bodies (none of which Bunshirou would touch this time, to both my relief and my surprise) told a different story, one of the boiling hot water that flowed deep in the ground underneath our feet. Sure, it was probably still colder than Florida typically was in April, but it was warmer than freezing, and I was more than happy to take that.

If I was being honest, I just wanted to relax in a hot spring and curl up in bed and sleep the nightmare of life away. Though I knew from past experience that I'd go stir crazy after a week at best without something to fuel the inner gears.

A vacation. That's what I needed.

Wasn't the Land of Hot Water known as a tourist destination when it wasn't serving as a metaphorical Belgium (or was it Switzerland?) in war? I wanna be a tourist. Let's be tourists.  _ That _ is a language I know well.

Though on the other hand, the Land of Hot Water had also produced Hidan. Yes, he was ousted from Yugakure, but that didn't mean there weren't more of his kind, and I didn't fancy coming across the folks who would  _ create _ Hidan.

If this was some kind of a dream, then I had some serious questions to ask Kishimoto on the extremely unlikely event I would ever meet him after waking up.

On the other hand (how many hands do these things have?), fiction was expected to be weird - take some real life concept and exaggerate it to some logical (or  _ il _ logical) extreme. Nobody, save the snobbiest of literary snobs, wanted to read fiction featuring mediocre people in ordinary situations. I’m looking at you,  _ Anne of Green Gables _ .

We stopped in a small village just outside Yugakure no sato, or the Village Hidden in the Steam, if the signs were to be believed. Three things caught my eye immediately.

First was the rise of the distant green peaks to the south, probably located in Hi no Kuni itself. A distant memory was triggered, one of an endlessly flat South Carolina interstate where the mountain peaks had just became visible, and excitement rose with the knowledge that, soon, we would be out of that state and that much closer to family and not-excruciatingly-hot summer weather and beds and delicious-if-not-healthy cooking. Here of course, I had no such thing to look forward to (except maybe the food). It had taken me literally almost dying to get Bunshirou to go to Kumogakure. There was no way he’d go to Konohagakure for anything less than Uchiha Madara himself chasing him there. But maybe he'd let us enjoy Yugakure.

The second was the sudden wall of bamboo. I did a double take. A wall of evergreen forests behind me. A wall of bamboo before me. There was no gradient, no mixing whatsoever. The sight triggered (yes,  _ triggered _ ) memories of the pine forests with perfectly straight rows and perfectly straight borders, planted because somebody had raped the land and then later decided not to build on the cleared fields. Of course, who was to say that  _ this _ tree phenomenon wasn’t naturally occurring? I shook my head and ran ahead into the village, eager to get rid of images of engineered forests.

There I was greeted by the third thing. Or things. Potatoes. Lots and lots of potatoes. Merchant stands selling potatoes, potato fries, potato chips, potato plants. Potato plants in the flowerbeds in front of the houses I could see instead of, you know, flowers. I wondered if this was what Ireland would have looked like had they bamboo and more forests than hills.

I gulped. I didn’t  _ hate _ potatoes, per se. I just didn’t like them very much, and the few ways I did like them, I didn’t care for how they gradually became globs in the back of my throat, making eating and breathing more difficult than it would have been were I eating anything else. I hoped that, if we settled here for a while and had to eat potatoes every day, Bunshirou-tou-san would let me into the kitchen and introduce him to the wonders of gnocchi. Forget that I was four and shouldn’t have known anything about cooking except for how to put a kettle full of water on a flame for tea, and that the only thing I knew to do with a blade was throw it at stationary targets.

Being of such close proximity to Yugakure, this village had a good number of tool shops and a large (for a tiny village) grocery market in the center.

I held my tongue as Tou-san dragged me around, fearing that I would say gibberish and be regarded as stupid despite the fact that four-year-old children were widely known and regarded for their gibberish. At least I could add some foodstuffs to my vocabulary and my brain was still small and quick enough to retain it right away. For example, I knew from Before that “potato chips” was “potechi” and today I learned that “potato” was “jagaimo.” That made six languages I knew that word in. Three of those languages I had no business knowing.

We ended the day’s shopping with fresh ink and brushes, an assortment of vegetables (mostly potatoes), a box of standard issue kunai, some rope, a bar of soap, and a fresh set of clothes (hooray - I had regretted losing my travel haori, and the shirt and pants I’d been forced to wear every day for the past month-and-a-half-minus-the-hospital straight were not only smelly but also getting to be too short). I watched as Tou-san sealed away the new supplies minus my new set of clothes which I was now wearing.

What boggled my mind was that, though Tou-san was making acquaintances with the merchants, not once had he talked about acquiring a living quarters. Perhaps I had been spoiled when sleeping in the hospital bed, but come on. Not even a hotel room? Those had to exist in this country somewhere.

I followed Tou-san into the woods, evergreen side, as the sky, already a pretty orange, slowly darkened. His intention was clear - we were eating and sleeping in the forest.

“Tou-san,” I began, speaking for the first time in hours.

“Hm?” He barely paid me any mind as he unsealed our sleeping bags.

Suddenly nervous and wanting to appear bashful in hopes that he’d end up acquiescing, I dipped my head, hooked my fingers behind me, and slowly swiveled in place. “Um, when are we going to settle down?”

I cringed at how useless my cutesy act was - he wasn’t even looking at me. I kept it up, just in case he  _ did _ look my way.

“We will be staying here for a while,” he said.

“Really?” My head raised and I leaned forward, unable to hide my delight.

“Yes, but we won’t be staying in a house or anything like that.”

My demeanor dropped. “Oh.”

The conversation seemed to end, with sounds being limited to scrolls and general woodland noise. I wasn’t really sure what to say to that. I wanted to ask why, but something was holding me back. I chalked it up to an instinct to never question my parental figure, something I had definitely not carried over from my previous life. Where had that come from?

Bunshirou finished setting up camp and the sun went down as we sat around a small fire, eating our rations. I could hear shuffling; it had to be the forest nightlife. There was a basic barrier seal around our campsite, so we were safe from animals. But that didn’t mean I felt safe.

I didn’t feel any better the next morning. I had a crick in my back from sleeping funny on a rock. Or a pea, except I wasn't a princess.

My dreams didn’t help either. I was so… weak… and useless. Slow, slower than I had ever been, sloshing around in invisible peanut butter, just barely dodging the neverending incoming projectiles among which was a train for some reason. At least it was a dream appropriate for a future shinobi. Appropriately forgettable and perhaps a bit terrifying.

Breakfast was a roasted potato. No butter or other meat or vegetables or anything. Being from the southern United States, I at least wanted butter on my potatoes. I globbed it down my throat.

I sat under a tree and tried to meditate. I had never been good at it Before, having never been instructed or anything like that. But having an extra circulatory system I could proprioceptively sense in myself and even grasp gave me something concrete to focus on, and in the past two years minus a month and a half, I had found it useful for building up and balancing my chakra. Opening the meridians it flowed through. Trying different combinations of opened and closed points and learning how they felt without manually altering them through tracing. I hadn't the luxury for it while we were travelling, but since we seemed to be staying for a few days, I had time.

It was also useful for restoring mental and emotional calm, which I really needed today.

“Kizuna, come, it's time to train.”

I gritted my teeth, mental calm lost. I was in the middle of something. How could he not tell that this was indeed part of my training?

“Now, Kizuna.”

I resisted an age-old urge to beat myself into submission just so he would stop telling me what to do, but I really just wanted to finish my meditation. My mouth wouldn't listen to me though, and so I got up silently and stiffly and walked over to Tou-san.

He frowned.

I swallowed and refused to meet his eyes.

“Kizuna, I know something’s up. Why don’t you tell me?”

“I haven’t said anything,” I caught myself saying. “How could you tell something’s up?”

“You think I don’t know my own daughter?” he retorted.

_ No, I don’t think you do. _ I stared back at him blankly.

“Seriously. Tell me what’s wrong.”

I lowered my head, staring at some dot on my shoe or something, then looked back up at him. “Tou-san, what are we doing here?”

Tou-san looked taken aback. “What?”

“I mean.” I looked down again and self-consciously began digging my toe into the dirt.  “You’re establishing connections with people as if we are going to be around for a good long while, so we're not tourists. But we’re not settling down in a house or apartment or anything. ”

I could hear him fold his arms. “Isn’t it obvious?”

I looked back up at him. “Humor me. Tell me.”

“Survival training.”

I blinked. “What -”

“Think fast!”

Before I could think, Bunshirou grabbed my shoulders, spinning us around before literally throwing me at a tree. In a panic I funnelled chakra to the right side of my body, cushioning the blow as I slammed into the tree, then instinctually jerked it to the left, creating a current that effectively suctioned me to the tree just long enough to figure out how to land on my feet when I eventually dropped to the ground, exhausted and in pain and maybe slightly thankful for the little bit of meditation I had managed. I glared at Bunshirou.

“ _ The hell? _ What was that for?!”

“Tree climbing training, which I’m glad to see you can do.” I think there was a hint of approval, though there was no slackening of the hardass instructor persona he had suddenly donned. “It’ll help when you’re training for other things like when we get into ninjutsu. And you aren’t always going to have the luxury of fighting someone who talks their entire game.”

“Oh my god, I'm not even five.” I shook my aching head. “Plus, if you were going to do this, then why didn't you do it while we were actually traveling and surviving?”

“Your mother's dead. What are you going to do when I'm gone too? I have a target on my back, I could be taken out at any time. Where does that leave you?”

I did not fail to notice that he did not answer my question. But I was getting seriously annoyed. “I'll deal with it when it happens!”

“You're not even FIVE!”

“I can be a civilian. I can weasel my way into another shinobi family if I have to.”

“And what if you can't? What if you die too?” He was legitimately shouting at this point. So much for not attracting attention. “Who will carry on the legacy of the Imanara and your mother?”

I snorted. “Well that's empowering, knowing I exist only to carry on a legend of an unjustifiably arrogant clan. Also, we don't know that mom's dead. They took her, they didn't necessarily kill her.”

“She might as well be dead,” he sniffed. “We'll probably never see her again anyway.”

I shook my head and turned around. “I don't need to listen to this.”

“Get back here, young lady,” Bunshirou growled. “You do not disrespect me by walking away.”

I didn’t bother to turn my head to face him as I walked away. “Come find me when you're done wallowing.”

* * *

It's not like I actually had an objection to survival training. I just really hated that he seemed to think that Kaa-san not being around meant her methods couldn't be around either.

I also hated his fatalistic attitude about everything. I bet that, had he lived in the world I had grown up in, he would have been one of those tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists. The world was out to get him and the illuminati could have us killed the moment they sensed that we had unplugged from the Matrix.

It reminded me sometimes of my mother. Minus the clan legacy junk and the extremes of conspiracy theories. (She only ever wore tinfoil that one time she tried having highlights in her black hair.)

(Of course, we were well aware that the government was in bed with some large, powerful corporations that didn't necessarily have we the people's best interests and well-being in mind.)

And I knew they both loved me and that I was being a brat this time around. Hiding in an oversized, too-hot pool of water, my skin pink as my hair while Tou-san surely anguished over my well-being and my mental state. I had given up swimming about thirty minutes ago and was simply marinating now.

But what else could I have done? I had submitted to my mother in that other life, pandered to most of her worries so that she could feel better about herself. And what had I gotten out of it? A tendency never to walk my own path because stepping out into a life just wasn't safe. Sitting on the couch watching endless YouTube videos and living my life vicariously through anime characters and Fanfiction. Going nowhere.

Sometimes I wondered if that was the reason I had been unceremoniously dumped into this world full of danger and adventure, making up for my previous life of inaction and missed opportunities.

For example, I never would have gone skinny dipping in a public hot spring. And here I was. Heck, I could have stood on the water and danced if I wanted to. (Or not. While I could water walk, it wasn't anywhere near the subconscious level I would have needed in order to dance.)

I sank further into the water where I sat on the underwater step, blowing bubbles from my nose in front of my eyes.

Maybe he was so fatalistic because he sensed that I had died already. It would make sense - most self inserts, or at least all of the ones I had read in Fanfiction from that other life, were the result of the character's death in their first world, and my situation was similar enough for comparison. I had already lost an entire life; it made sense if he did not want me to lose another one and was just terrible at speaking aloud his reasons.

Maybe he was trying to give me a reason to keep living, something that might understandably be lacking in someone who had already experienced death once. I wasn't sure that applied to me though since I had zero recollection of the events that transpired between my last intact other life memories and being butt naked and freezing, fresh out of Kaa-san’s oven. I didn't even know then.

Could it therefore be said that I had experienced death when I had no memories to corroborate it?

“Aren't you a little young to be in here?” someone asked.

I lifted my face out of the steamy water and rubbed at my temples as the speaker, a blonde girl, settled into the water next to me. I waited until she was all the way in to look at her. Her dark eyes regarded me carefully, and I looked away.

Well damn. A nosey outsider had come in. Now I had to stay and sulk some more.

“Aren't you a little young to have the weight of a world on your face?” she said.

“You might be surprised,” I mumbled, standing up and ignoring her eyes on my underage body. I stepped out of the pool and began to towel myself dry. At least I could be dry and not so cold while she unloaded.

“That's my line,” she said. “At least you're obvious.”

I paused drying myself. Did I want to hear this girl's story, spend even more time wallowing in what my other life had become?

No, not really.

I wrapped myself in the towel, waved my goodbye, and went back inside, steeling myself to go back to Tou-san and his inevitable lectures, among the first of which would undoubtedly be the inappropriateness of a four-and-a-half-year-old going by herself to a public hot spring in a country that wasn't yet quite home.

(I still was no closer to figuring out why we were staying here in the first place.)

But in order to live, I first had to survive.

And isn't that all Bunshirou wanted in the first place?

* * *

I didn't have a clue where Tou-san would be hiding in this place, but it couldn't be too hard to find him in a village this small.

Indeed, there he was, the moment I stepped outside the bathhouse, glasses shining, the only thing light about his face as he snatched up my Standard Female Grab Area and began dragging me away. Oh, this was going to be bad.

I supposed I was expecting him to take longer to find me, but, thinking about it, he had had so much time to find me in this tiny village that he had undoubtedly eliminated every other place long before I had thought to leave the hot spring. The only thing stopping him from coming in and getting me was that the spring had separate facilities for males and females, and there was no way he was walking into a women's changing room.

“What the hell were you doing in there?” he growled once we were away from people, shaking dangerously.

I had never heard this tone out of him. I recognized it, similar to the one I had heard from my mother when I had done something incredibly stupid.

“Sorting out thoughts about --”

“I don't want to hear it,” he interrupted.

_ Then why’d you even ask? _ I steeled myself. “I was trying to cool down!”

“You don't need to  _ cool down _ , especially not in a  _ hot spring!” _

“So did you want me to just stay and stew in it?”

“No!” he snapped. “I expect you to listen to me and obey --”

“Like a mindless little servant, okay--”

_ SMACK! _

I twisted around and raised my hands at him, palms open, trying to ignore the stinging of where his hand had hit my face and the welling of tears in my eyes. (So much for cooling down.)

_ I don't want to fight you. Why am I fighting you? _

He was poised to backhand me, but I twisted out of the way in time, sweeping my leg around as well. Of course in the battle between a grown, experienced shinobi’s tree trunk leg and a tiny, fresh, four-year-old twiggy leg, the shinobi is going to win. I ended up flat on my back, and before I could blink Bunshirou was on top of me, a steel trap keeping me pinned to the cold stone beneath me. I bit back more tears. A few escaped anyway.

I could see Bunshirou's purple eyes, a fire of emotion burning a hole in the already burning, reddening handprint on my cheeks. And then they were obscured by his own tears.

“I expect you to respect me because I am your father and I am responsible for you.” He was shaking now, adding to the pressure on my body being squished between his body and the ground. “I expect you to listen to me and do as I say because you are still young and inexperienced. And how else are you going to learn?”

_ I never wanted to fight you. Why are you doing this? How did we end up like this? _

I fought to squash that self pitying voice playing inside my head, and while I managed to stop the  _ why me _ whining, I couldn't stop the stupidly defiant  _ I'll show him _ voice.

_ Me. I'm how we ended up like this. _

He wanted me to do as he said? Fine. I'd do that. I gritted my teeth, fighting my inner dialogue and my decision and the inevitability that that decision would come to pass.

Bunshirou finally got off of me. I lay there for a moment, panting and trying to slow my breathing, before rolling over, sitting up and crouching into a bow.

“Hai, Otou-sama,” I said, putting on the best docile and submissive voice I could muster.

I could practically hear his eyes narrow in disgust. “And cut the shitty attitude.”

My body tensed again as I tried to keep the internal pity party at bay. I was going to grind my teeth into nubs at this point.

And in that moment, I think Uchi Naru Kizuna was born.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter almost didn't happen. And it almost wasn't on time (for those in the States at least). Yay writer's block.
> 
> Also I've been watching too much RWBY. I'm hoping to use it to improve my combat writing scenes. I looked back to one of my old Code Lyoko stories Cliffhanger the other day and I was like, Why is this scene so good? Why do all my other action scenes suck? XD Anyway, there's a bit of time for that so.
> 
> I may up the story rating to M, depending on how I write certain scenes.
> 
> GlidingOne, my beta and one of my bestest fwends in da whole wide world, has released a new story in the DC universe. Go check it out! /shameless obligatory plug


	5. Chapter 5

When I recovered from my temper tantrum (because really, what else was I supposed to call it?), Tou-san was waiting for me with a freshly skinned and gutted  _something_. I stared at it, my jaw hanging. Clearly it had once been alive, and it wasn't the beef or pork or chicken (or fish) I was accustomed to eating in the Before.  _(Is that what I'm calling it now?)_

I really couldn't tell what it was, so I continued to stare at it as if expecting it to somehow magically tell me what it was and what to do with it. It was a hunk of meat, so I guessed it would be cooked.

"Otou-san, what is that?" I asked when my speech came back to me, pointing at it.

"Dinner," he replied. "You're going to cook it."

I shook my head. "Okay, I got that. But what...  _was_... it?" As soon as the question left my mouth I kind of regretted it. Too late though.

" _Ressaa panda desu,_ " he said.

Obviously it wasn't a panda bear, as it was too small even for a cub, and the only other animal I knew of that had "panda" in the title was the red panda. But if it  _was_  red panda, it wasn't a perfect cognate - wouldn't it have "aka" in it somewhere? And "ressaa" didn't exactly translate into "red" as far as I knew. Either way, my heart sank a little - I was afraid that our prey had been cute.

Oh well. I could at least sort of comfort myself with the idea that it was for survival, not for trophy or prestige.

"I hunted, skinned, and gutted it today," he continued. "And I'll help you cook it, since you don't know how to cook anything yet." Not true, but he didn't know that. "As we keep doing this, you'll be taking on more of the task until you can hunt and kill the prey yourself."

_So I'll be hunting and cooking every day then._  I suppressed a groan, which Uchi Naru Kizuna ate for breakfast. I didn't  _hate_  cooking, but it wasn't something I had wanted to do every single day in either life. Now I didn't have a choice - Tou-san was serious about this survival thing, even if I didn't know why and he wouldn't explain it to me.

(Well, I  _did_  have a choice if I bothered to bring up that convoluted stuff from a seminar I had been in in that other life. The same stuff that should have prevented the birth of Uchi Naru Kizuna, who was already leeching off me, and she wasn't even a few hours old.)

Tou-san unfurled one of his scrolls, slammed his hand down, and a sizable stock pot poofed into existence. I had seen that pot a few times before when we had been lucky enough to run across easy prey while walking. I wasn't a stranger to eating game meat, but until this point he had allowed me the ignorance and spared me the sight of our food before it had become food and wasn't just a dead animal.

He handed me the pot and pointed me to a nearby creek. "Can you fill this pot halfway with water?"

"Hai," I responded and waded down to the creek. Several minutes later I stumbled back, the pot balanced on my head, doing what I could to not spill any of the precious water. If we were getting water from creeks now, then we were really doing survival.

_Why not take the extra step, and break rocks to make stone knives so we can carve our own plateware,_  Uchi Naru supplied.  _Or make mud pots, that would work too._

I told it - that voice -  _her?_  - to shut up, and my jaw tightened just a little.

No, I told myself as I set down the pot. I was okay with this. We had to survive and apparently this was the way to do it. Survival in the shinobi world was hard. This was hard. Ergo, we were surviving. I nodded, content to let that convoluted piece of logical fallacy sit and stew.

Tou-san was kindling a fire in a fire pit (had I really taken that long to get the water?), but stopped to hand me a kunai.  _Holy shit, I was holding an actual kunai!_  It was large in my grip and the metal looked freshly sharpened. What else did he carry in those scrolls? And did he have shadow clones working for him or something?

He set down some of the vegetables he had bought yesterday between us and picked up a carrot. In his other hand he held another kunai. "Watch," he said, and he began slicing the carrot in his hand, dropping the bits into the stock pot. It was a knife technique mostly familiar to me - I was accustomed to having a cutting board and a single-edged knife, not my hand and a double-edged blade, but still close enough. "Cut all of these," he further instructed. "Try to keep them all the same size."

"Hai," I said and began slicing through the vegetables.

Yu no Kuni must have been one of the more westernized countries Kishimoto had designed - the vegetables were all familiar to me, things that I wouldn't find uncommon in the vegetable-and-meat soups my mother had made in the Before. Carrots, potatoes, celery, mushrooms, even a bit of corn.

And the meat was the probably-a-red-panda Tou-san was cubing nearby.

One potato was particularly difficult to slice through. It had probably been dug up too early maybe (or maybe not, I had never grown potatoes so I didn't actually know). I forced it, and hissed as the kunai pushed through, slicing my hand in the process. I dropped the potato, which now had blood on it.

Tou-san was at my side in an instant, my bleeding hand in his. I looked away, puffed my cheeks and clenched my jaw, trying to bite back childish tears. Then strangely relaxed as the pain went away and a whirring noise filled my ears. I looked back to find my hand encased in the glowing green chakra of iryo-ninjutsu, the cut gone. Who knew! He actually  _could_  use it effectively.

"Th-thank you," I mustered.

I looked away again, only slightly stunned, as he let go of my hand and directed me to finish the vegetables. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pick up the bloody potato.

"Um," I started. "Why are you adding that potato to the soup? There's blood on it."

He looked back at me. "Waste not."

_That's definitely not sanitary,_  I thought, but I nodded anyway.  _And kind of morbid._

It wasn't like there wasn't still blood in the meat anyway. (It would cook out.)

* * *

Once the meat and vegetables were simmering in the pot, Tou-san took me aside.

"I know you're angry at me," he started, and that got my attention immediately. I had pulled an Eisenhower and delegated my anger away - expressing it was urgent but not important to me, so I had dumped it on Uchi Naru. And now it - she? - was clawing at the chance to raise hell. I pushed it-her down and maintained my blank stare.

_God, I really_ am  _turning into Kasa._

"- and we have a lot of time before our stew finishes. So we're going to kill three birds with one stone. Or punch, as it were." He grinned slightly at some joke I didn't get yet and held up his hands. "I want you -" he pointed at me - "to punch my palms." He lightly fisted one palm.

"Uh, okay." I formed a fist and fell into a stance.

"STOP, stop stop," he said, stopping me. "Didn't your mother ever teach you to form a fist?"

Maybe? I stared at my fist, opened it, and closed it again, this time taking care to curl my knuckles and squish my fingertips (or at least that was what it felt like). I left my thumb loose while I tested it against my own palm. Best to curl it under but not grasp it, so maybe I wouldn't break it. Especially if I aimed to hit with the parts of my fingers between the second and third knuckles. Like a wall.

"That's a better start," he said. "See how it feels."

"Like I'm squishing my fingers with a  _hydraulic press_."

"Haidorooriku puressu?"

"It's nothing."

"Try not to clench it so much."

I loosened my fist, and immediately tightened it again as I threw a punch at his hand.

"Stop! Ugh, didn't your mother ever teach you to punch? Didn't she give you any physical conditioning?"

"Physical conditioning, yeah," I replied.

Silence.

"What did she do?"

"She trained me to be strong enough to lift two of me and taught me that -" I paused, searching for the exact words Naomi-kaa-san had used - "interrupting the governing vessel the right way can force shut down someone's chakra."

"And chakra manipulation is flat handed," he finished, visibly suppressing a groan.

"I haven't really needed a fist until now."

"Not even when you were being bullied at school?"

"No." Because I knew that fighting with fists said that I was looking for a fight, while fighting with flat hands said I didn't want to fight but would if I had to. And that little detail could and often did make the difference between whipping and flogging as punishment for unauthorized fighting in the hallways. (If I thought about it, the disciplinary system at Yukigakure Ninja Academy was akin to the parental philosophy of punishing all the children to make sure they punished the right one. Which was also a thought I held about some forms of socialism.)

Bunshirou exhaled audibly. "Okay. I was planning on letting you beat my hands to a pulp, but we have to fix your form first."

"Hai."

* * *

The next few hours saw me slapping the trunk of a tree at all angles until well after my hands started feeling like they were going to fall off, then my hands being wrapped so I could slap the tree some more. It was well past dark by the time I was allowed to stop, my hands tingling painfully for a good hour afterward. I gathered my clarinet performance career was ruined. Brain surgery was probably also out.

The soup had been mostly delicious, savory with an intense gamey flavor that overbalanced the vegetables, even if it hurt almost too much to pick up the bowl and even though it would never be as good as pho or ramen. The air was full of the aroma, which was terrible for stealth and not being found, but I guessed we were waiting to refine that.

Which we did, over the course of the next five months, along with a ton of other things worthy of a training montage.

Like running the heck away from the battles that erupted at random between Kumo and Konoha and occasionally the Yu-nin when the big fights got too close to the tourists. And while that was exciting (a term I use very loosely), it didn't happen often and was punctuated with long periods of boredom, relocating from formerly undestroyed parts of the forests to parts on some cosmic unwritten plan for destruction, and practicing most of the  _same things_  ad nauseum.

Okay, so not the  _same_  things, a lot of building on concepts he had already introduced to me, such as his promised lessons on finding food for survival. You'd think learning how to kill and butcher animals and forage different plants for food would be at least a little interesting. You'd be mostly wrong.

At least I was allowed to practice meditation again, though Bunshirou had me staring at a candle flame for hours on end in what was otherwise a sensorily deprived area. Something about lowering the absolute threshold, whatever that was. This kind of stuff occasionally gets thrown into montage scenes, right? Naruto meditating to attain sage mode, anyone?

The whole time though, I never sat in front of a scroll for more than five minutes, even my own scrolls that contained merely the markings of my mental meanderings. Wasn't I supposed to be learning to read and write or something? Not that Before and Naomi-kaa-san hadn't tried, but that was a long time ago.

It was easy to forget the circumstances when I was accomplishing my objective of slapping and later kicking the shit out of trees. Meditation slash stare-at-a-candle time was, for obvious reasons, mostly different. I'd get into total sync, become one with the flame and that junk, suppress Uchi Naru, and question my existence.

No, none of that existential stuff. Or how I got there aside from the obvious discussion I was sure to get as an almost-five-year-old - "Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much." Actually I didn't know the answer to that question, the one that parents would tell their kids in this world at this age. But I'm distracted now.

What was the point of all this training?

I got it, I needed survival skills. We weren't financially well off - we couldn't be, since Bunshirou spent all of his time with me and therefore couldn't be working a job. We were literally living in the woods, near but not in civilization.

I was clear that Bunshirou would start teaching me actual ninjutsu when he thought I was ready for it, and maybe also genjutsu.

But why?

We had no village. The Imanara had never had a proper village. Who knew where the Hamauzu had come from. (My best guess was Uzushiogakure, which, unless we were early in the timeline, something I still hadn't established for myself at this point, had probably been destroyed already.)

We had a clan name but, as far as I was concerned, we had no clan.

We had no allegiances but to ourselves and to each other.

So what were we fighting for? What was I training for?

* * *

One bright day in September, while meditating in Hollow Tree Number Twenty-Three (how do so many of these exist in forests composed of evergreens and bamboo?), I heard Bunshirou's footsteps, which was  _something_  because one does not simply hear shinobi approaching on pine needles, nevermind be able to identify them with as much certainty as I did just now. If I had cat ears I would have perked them toward him, but I didn't have cat ears, so I settled for a slight nod in his direction.

And that's when it hit me.

The sweet, doughy, cold scent of  _mochi_.

I couldn't stop my breath from hitching, hard as I tried to force it back to normal. Pavlov's dinner bell had rung and I was panting like a dog in need of my sweet, sweet mochi. It was all I could do not to sway in place.

"This will never do," I heard behind me, which after hours of near-silence felt like a long-range metronome at the back of my head.

My breathing quickened more, as the extra sensory stimulus and agitation from not being able to rock woke up Uchi Naru, whom I had nearly completed suppressing for the day. I clenched my fists (properly formed now, happy to say), digging my nails into my palms.

"If you're still sitting there, how am I supposed to give you this mochi?"

That did it. I whipped around, facing him with wide eyes that were all for the mochi in his hands. I used up my last bit of impulse control to keep myself from outright eating them out of his hands. I cupped my hands and held them up, he dumped the balls of dough into my hands, and I plopped a whole one into my mouth.

Red bean. Not my favorite, but it had been so long that I didn't care. It was doughy, almost gelatinous on the outside and creamy on the inside, and sweet, and that was all I needed.

"You should really take smaller bites and savor your food more. It's more feminine."

I swallowed the treat whole and gave him a  _look_ , but I was too excited over the rare treat to be really annoyed. I grinned and, never taking my eyes off of him, plopped the entire second one into my mouth.

Matcha green tea. My third favorite. This one I savored as long as I could. I  _might_  have made those obnoxious noises and faces that girls in anime or people in cooking shows often make when eating something delicious.

"Happy birthday, Kizuna-chan."

He reached down and hugged me. I was only a little annoyed that I couldn't eat my third piece of mochi right away, but I couldn't resist the rush of oxytocin that flooded my body when the hug lingered past the point of awkwardness. I patted him with my free hand.

Then he let go and I ate the last mochi.

Maybe, just for today, I could be okay with this life.

(Sakura-cherry. My favorite flavor.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly didn't mean for the first part of this chapter to turn into an instruction manual. It's kind of hard to write things like this when there are no clear structures for what and how to learn like there are in other school-age fics. It's kind of like the entire Academy arc of the Boruto anime, but worse because it's just her and her father and the occasional stranger whereas Boruto at least has a large and varied cast and a school to dictate what they're learning, and I've decided not to include other-character-POV in this story (that's for side stories).
> 
> Oh yeah. There will eventually be side stories.
> 
> Anyway short month equals short chapter for y'all who are reading. Whoever y'all are.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is very late. As always, the story is most up-to-date on FanFiction.Net.
> 
> Disclaimer: I do not claim to know anything about mental illness aside from what Wikipedia and PsychCentral and a handful of people on Quora say, and I do not claim to be representing it in this story.

"Do you ever miss her?"

"Who?" I asked. I didn't need to ask. Though the timing of the question was a bit jarring, I knew exactly who he was talking about.

"Your mother," he replied, breaking form. I breathed an internal sigh of relief - I didn't like nage no kata, even less being the  _uke_ , where I was always being thrown around so I could learn how to land and recover properly from throws. The fact that it was distantly familiar to me from my short time in judo in the Before; I hadn't liked this kata then either. It hurt then and it hurt now.

I grunted something that would've meant "I dunno" in the Before. I didn't know if it translated directly here, but Bunshirou seemed to understand my intended response anyway.

"You were so young when she was taken away…"

"Otou-san, that was less than a year ago," I said, wiping the dirt and debris off my shoulders since practice seemed to be over.

"And yet you've forgotten all about her."

I furrowed my brow. "I haven't even had time to forget her." I didn't tend to  _think_  of her much, constantly being in training or life-threatening situations with little besides sleep in-between, but that didn't mean I'd forgotten.

He ignored me. "Do you remember everything she taught you?"

"I mean, you and I just went over basic kanji and yin release a few days ago. I know you didn't teach me any of that. And I have spent four times as much time with her as I have with you in my entire life." I held up four fingers to emphasize my point. And it wasn't a lie, no matter how you looked at it. Four years was definitely longer than one.

He stared at me for a moment and then nodded, looking away. He seemed almost disturbed and yet reluctantly accepting, from what I could see of the way his lip curled and folded against his beard, which had been allowed to grow and fill out in the past months, and the way the light reflected off his spectacles.

Come to think of it, my hair was getting pretty long now too. If I had had a proper hair-tie, I would have been putting it in a low ponytail. I wasn't any good at using what passed for a non-elastic hair-tie in the forest, so I had been letting it hang loose. I could have let it form dreads, I suppose, but the idea didn't cross my mind at the time. Plus I didn't like dreads. I couldn't imagine what it would take to take care of them. On the other hand, it would probably be useful for me to be able to fight with my hair in my face since life couldn't always be beautifully drawn anime characters whose hair is always flawless in a fight (until they started to lose confidence of course).

"What does that mean to you?" he asked.

"Hmm?" What were we talking about? ...Oh yeah, Kaa-san. "Oh, I guess that she did some stuff for me, and you've done some stuff too but she had longer than you've had so far."

"Did you ever love her?"

My eyes widened, and I screwed my face back into dispassionate submission as I addressed the red sirens going off. What kind of question was that supposed to be?! I'd struggled with that in my first life with my Mom. And Naomi-kaa-san had never been "Mom" to me despite being my mother in this life. At any rate, it was impossible not to have some sort of feeling towards someone I had spent four years in close proximity with and who attended to my every need, but I wasn't sure I'd call it love.

At the same time, telling Bunshirou "no" or "I don't know" would set off more red flags than the extended silence probably had already. A child is supposed to love their parents. And it was clear that he had loved Naomi very very much. The idea that I did not love the person with whom he had chosen to procreate me, or that said person had not communicated that to me in such a way that I could do nothing but respond in kind - that would have to be devastating to him.

Sure, I liked Naomi very much. She knew how to be a parent. She was an adequate caretaker, an effective teacher, a ferocious guardian, and her mochi making skills were second to none. Was that enough for me to love her?

I sighed internally and fed the white lie to Uchi Naru.

" _Kaa-san ga daisuki desu,_ " I said.

It wasn't a lie. "Daisuki" or 「大好き」played a similar role in Japanese as "aime" did in French, mainly that it could mean "like" or "love." More specifically, it translated into "like very much," but I was counting on Bunshirou to understand it as "love" so that we could end this conversation and never speak of it again. Didn't we have some throwing strategies to practice today? Or better yet, hand-breaking I mean iron palm techniques.

I could tell Bunshirou wasn't wholly satisfied with my answer - the terminology or the delivery I couldn't be sure - but to my relief he didn't pursue it any further.

(I distantly wondered if this was the kind of thing Sakura was referring to when she told Hinata that Naruto didn't know the difference between loving a bowl of ramen and loving another human romantically. Which I thought was total horseshit since Sakura had phrased it as "loving another human" and Naruto clearly knew how to love people, platonically at least. I made a mental note to ask Naruto about it on the off chance I ever got to meet him.)

* * *

The quiet, sometimes Disney-esque forest was annoyingly prone to bursting into explosions and deadly elemental shows immediately preceding what was sure to be a bloodbath befitting that of the two warring nations Kumogakure and Konohagakure, only to immediately return to its former serenity after the destruction had ceased. It had happened often enough by this point that I had to wonder how Yu no Kuni was so successful in upholding its tourism industry. Was there some unknown treaty we didn't know about that kept the battles away from civilian vacation areas? And if so, why didn't we live there instead?

(I wonder if it was because  _everybody was Kung Fu fighting_.)

Regardless, our priority was to preserve our own lives and not get involved, especially with Konoha-nin for some reason. I was too young and small to have much of a fighting chance yet.

So that's how I went from being thrown around by Tou-san to being thrown around by a bunch of warring shinobi with the only warning being a brief rustling of our border traps being triggered just microseconds before everything went to chaos.

The moment I was able to put my feet below me I hightailed it due east. Tou-san had always said to run east, toward the ocean, if we got separated during a battle, and he would find me there.

Going west would've probably been a better idea that day. The fighting only got more intense as I pushed my way through, narrowly missing several explosions and stray shuriken and a few more grazing my skin and clothes. I was looking at missing training again to patch my shirt if this kept up.

I turned a corner to avoid some obstacle and found myself being knocked back on my butt. I looked up and it was a mook, a Konoha-nin, and he was looking right at me with unadulterated disgust. On second glance it wasn't quite aimed at me but that didn't really change what it was.

"Kumo sends its  _toddlers_  into battle?!"

Uh oh. I had yet to be tested in actual combat. And he thought I was from Kumo.

...And  _hey!_  Uchi Naru protested before I could stop her.  _I'm not a toddler! Besides, wasn't Kakashi_ five  _when he made genin? I'm five now. If I'm a toddler then so was he!_

Granted, Kakashi was trained by the White Fang, who was said on several occasions throughout the series to have been a shinobi who outclassed even the Sannin. Naomi and Bunshirou were good, but they weren't Sannin material. Probably. I mean, they'd lost to the Yuki-nin.

... _Fuck._  I needed to get out of there. Just because I was pint sized didn't mean they wouldn't beat the shit out of me if they thought I was from Kumo. Which, why would they assume that? Even if they based it on my unfamiliar appearance, a hitai-ate was standard attire, practically required and location didn't matter so long as it was visible, for all genin from all nations and I wasn't wearing one.

Uchi Naru's interference and my subsequent loss of my train of thought cost me the opportunity to tell the mook I wasn't from Kumo. He started weaving handsigns, and I jumped back hoping to avoid the onslaught of whatever jutsu he was about to pummel me with. Little kid or not, I was a perceived enemy and therefore had to be eliminated.

His hand sparked with a flashy raiton. Well shit. How was I supposed to outrun lightning?

The lightning arced in my direction, and in a moment of  _why the hell not_ , I caught it with the first two fingers of my right hand and immediately fried myself with the energy. I was launched backward from the force of impact and was hit with a mix of self-satisfaction and dread that I wasn't dead.

Lightning redirection technique from  _Avatar the Last Airbender_ : doesn't work in the Narutoverse. At least, not without some training I didn't have.

The Konoha mook approached me fast, only for me to be launched me several feet into the air by a doton. Great, someone else had noticed me. More specifically, someone had noticed that I wasn't one of them.

"Fucking Konoha pansies," said a new voice. "Are you going to virtue us into defeat by sending your toddlers into battle? Think we won't destroy them too? You're all the same to us."

_Shit._  This one thought I was from Konoha.

I landed on someone's waiting foot and was promptly punted into the nearest tree.

"Oh shit," said the Konoha-nin. "The kid's not from Kumo."

I managed to stick myself to the tree instead of crumpling to the ground right away. I didn't need more injuries than I was already sustaining.

The Kumo-nin was flying toward me anyway, armed with a kunai.

This was it. Move or die.

I pushed off the tree and flung myself into her arms, under her weapon. I reached for the thankfully exposed, soft flesh of her underarm, pinched it with my needle-y five-year-old fingers, and  _pulled_ , taking flesh and nerves with me. I kneed her as hard as I could in the groin. Anything to disable and slow her down even though most of this wasn't my actual training. My back hit the tree again, having lost the weight battle when we collided, and the kunai blade dug into my back. This time I didn't stick and we tumbled down the tree, me eventually landing on top, ears ringing over her screaming and expletives. The Kumo-nin appeared to be out of commission until a medic could get to her. Good enough for me.

I got off of her and turned, only to come face-to-face with the Konoha-nin, staring at me and weaving more handsigns. Apparently I was dangerous enough that he was going to kill me regardless of the fact that I wasn't actually an enemy. And the adage of  _the enemy of my enemy is my friend_  didn't seem to apply here even though I had just single-handedly effectively decommissioned his enemy, who was twice my size and had far more training and luckily for me lacking armor in all the right places, right in front of him.

I reached around and pulled the kunai from my back, hissing. I supposed it was mine now. Fortunately it wasn't buried very deeply, and while it hurt like hell, the training I had done with Bunshirou (even though it was all blunt force) must have increased my pain tolerance, or maybe it was the adrenaline that was keeping me from passing out. I was going to need a serious nap after this was all over. And possibly some surgery.

And this Konoha mook was in my way.

I made a noise of frustration. For some reason it didn't occur to me to say,  _Excuse me, I just defeated your enemy for you, I'm not from Kumo and I'm not against you and I didn't even want to be in this fight or your war, so please stop trying to kill me_. Or maybe it did, and it didn't occur to me that he'd listen.

My chakra was draining fast from all the fighting up to this point. Even though I hadn't used it in any particularly chakra-taxing techniques, it was currently keeping me from bleeding out of my back and, in conjunction with the adrenaline, giving me enough strength to stand and fight. I couldn't last much longer. I'd have to fight dirty with him too. Maybe I could slow him down with that new jutsu I'd been working on.

I flexed my non-kunai hand, bending my fingers at the first joint while holding the second joint rigid and straight. It was the best hand analogy I could come up with for the way I knew to mould yin chakra, and this way was faster than doing it without the handsign.

I ran towards him with the charged jutsu, narrowly missing whatever jutsu he had thrown my way in the process, and planted my flexed hand on him. Immediately his face went slack and eyes blank. I thanked God it worked and hightailed it away.

I didn't get very far before I felt him grab my standard female grab area. I guessed my technique had failed, for him to have released it so quickly. I twisted out of it only for him to grab my hair.

Now we were mad. Who was we? Why, me and Uchi Naru of course.  _Nobody_  touches the hair. (Okay, so it wasn't that important to me, but I needed something to fuel my fight against this man because I was dangerously close to chakra exhaustion.) Anyway it hurt. Everything hurt at this point. I made a fist that Tou-san would've been proud of and connected it with his jaw as I whirled around in his grasp.

_Leavemealoneleavemealoneleavemealone_

He dropped me finally. I stabbed him in the groin with the kunai. (Why protective cups weren't part of the standard shinobi uniform, I didn't know.) He crumpled over, and I continued to stomp on him until he stopped moving and I lost momentum on my strikes.

I stood over the mook. Now that I was right by him and we weren't twisting away from each other, I could see his face clearly. His pallor was quickly going ashen as the life slowly trickled from him ( _holy shit, did I do that?)_ , but his eyes still had a spark in them. Of life. Of resolve and determination. Those black eyes fixed themselves on my purples, and suddenly the ringing in my ears got worse and I became deaf to the noises of battle around me.

Time slowed down as my eyes trailed down to his hands, weakly moving into what I realized were hand signs, then to the bloody kunai in my own hand, which suddenly weighed twenty pounds. I watched my free hand move slowly, automatically, gripping the kunai and holding it above my head, pointed toward the ground.

Toward the mook.

Toward his neck.

My senses returned to me.  _Was I really about to kill this man?_  I sank to my knees and I could feel my jaw trembling. How could I do such a thing?! Especially in this state.

The ringing became overwhelming, but I couldn't move, couldn't bring my hands to my ears. All I knew was  _I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to-_

A pair of flashes, the scattering of some leaves, and the ringing was gone, like it never was there. All sound was gone except for breathing, shaky.  _My_  breathing. This whole time I hadn't even noticed how hard I was breathing until it became hard  _to_  breathe.

In front of me, the mook, eyes wide open and glassy, his face relaxed, not moving, and definitely not breathing.

Next to me, Bunshirou, purple eyes fiery, the lines underneath them pronounced in a way I hadn't seen in nearly a year, jaw and fists clenched. His lips moved, but my ears wouldn't work. I was underwater, drowning.

I felt like I was drowning forever, but time immediately reset to its normal rate when I felt the slap across my face. My eyes watered for the first time since the battle started, and my jaw fell as I turned back and my father held my face, fingers digging under the corners of my jawbone just underneath my ears, forcing me to look at him. He looked angry, dangerous, and yet-

Was that an ounce of  _fear_  in his countenance?

"Kizuna." He started and then stopped, and I could hear the anguish in his voice. If that was what was in his voice, then he must have come really close to losing. And then I realized that what he had nearly lost was me.

He shook his head and tried again.

"Kizuna, I don't know how you got them, but the shinobi world is not the place to deal with your personal issues."

Bunshirou let of me and shunshin'd away, leaving me to seethe and sulk, a hurting, teary, red-faced, blubbering mess.

He wasn't wrong. But not knowing how I got my personal issues?! Or at least the ones that I didn't drag over from my past life? He knew about the abuse I had undergone in the short time I had spent at shinobi academy in Yukigakure. He had to have known that I came home every day with a rainbow of bruises on my skin, even if they were clear after long treatments of iryo-ninjutsu by the time I went to bed. Let's not even start on the verbal abuse I had suffered there. Even if I was a former adult with full knowledge that those kids were full of shit, that stuff stays with a little kid like I was supposed to be. (And yet despite all that, there had never been death associated with the academy; I hadn't been in it long enough to experience desensitization. I knew that death was often an integral part of a shinobi's life, but it was still so far away, no closer than an dramatic animation on a screen.)

And then there was the attack and kidnapping of my own mother figure. There may have been death associated with that, but I was barely protected from direct exposure by the wall that separated the hallway from the living room as well as the ambiguity of her fate. Still, it was shallow to think that couldn't be traumatic.  _He_  was traumatized by it!

And he was telling  _me_  not to drag my personal issues around with me?

He couldn't see the junk I was carrying from my past life, but he knew about my past in this life, and that should have been enough for him to understand. And it wasn't.

And now I had just nearly killed two people, one of whom ended up actually dead in front of me by my father's hand. Even if I hadn't landed  _the_  killing blow, it was still more than my psyche was prepared to accommodate.

Still, he wasn't wrong. I had to concede that. As a shinobi, I was to be nothing more than a mindless tool. Hesitation meant death.

Personal issues didn't belong to me in the field, and the sooner I mastered that the more effective (read: likely to survive) I would be. They belonged to my future higher-ups. If not my boss, then my boss's boss or my clan head or daimyo or whoever was pissed off or paid enough to send me out to do the dirty work.

In other words, shinobi didn't live for themselves. That got the world nowhere.

I just wasn't sure I agreed with living for others the same way that shinobi lived for others.

But that wasn't my decision to make.

I shook my head and slowly got up, miraculously ignored up to that point, and resumed my flight east.

I shrank that day, and Uchi Naru Kizuna grew.

* * *

Despite the numerous injuries I had sustained in that fight and the week I had spent recovering afterwards, life returned to normal astonishingly quick. It always did. It wasn't uncommon for me to escape a battle with injuries from stray weapons and so the patching up of clothing was routine. The fighting had cleared by the time I caught up to Bunshirou, slightly more worn than usual. That basically meant an extra half-day of healing and sewing, and with the frequent practice I was getting good. But that would have to come later.

I was tired from the ordeal, my breath denoting itself in exhausted wheezes as I struggled to regain my air. I wanted to cry and throw myself into his arms but somehow bottling up my emotions for Uchi Naru to deal with later seemed like a better idea even though, in retrospect, crying from the pain of my wounds that I had been  _running on_  for the past however long it had been should have been plenty of enough reason to cry.

Still, Bunshirou appeared in front of me almost as soon as I reached the sandy clearing, urging me to hold still while he inspected my well-being the way I used to inspect my clarinet after someone knocked it over on its stand. When he was satisfied that I was Not Dying, I was laid on the ground while he healed the worst of my injuries in silence except for the nearby water and the whirring of his jutsu.

This time was different. I didn't want him to touch me. Even though iryo-ninjutsu didn't require physical touch, I still wanted those hands nowhere near me. Those hands that had killed what I had been content to let lie already dying, and were trying to heal me now.

But to speak up would be to alert him that something was wrong, and I was adamant that nothing was wrong.

It was life. It was shinobi life. It was the life I had been born into, and the only way out was death, and I didn't want to die. And the only way to survive was to kill. And I wasn't to have an issue with it.

After all, that would be  _feeling_ , and shinobi were expert feeling squashers.

Yet, I was sure I had only survived that battle because of feelings of fear driving me to acts of desperation.

A shinobi who used feelings to fight, feelings that she wasn't supposed to have. I was just as much a contradiction as  _he_  was.

So I let him continue. I'd get over it eventually.

He continued to stare at me oddly throughout the week, as if he knew something had shifted inside me. I wondered what he thought but I didn't dare ask. I didn't need him knowing I was having  _emotions_  and  _issues_  with what had happened. I also didn't need him knowing that I was holding onto these issues far longer than I normally would have Before. It probably had to do with the fact that he was the only other person I ever saw outside of the chaos of battle; it wasn't like I could talk to friends.

I did occasionally blurt out lines of dialogue before I remembered that the conversational partner wasn't actually there. And Uchi Naru was there to make me feel like shit every time it happened, especially when Bunshirou was around. Didn't matter that I had done that before  _and_  Before.

Clearly I was going insane.

Just because I was mostly physically healed by this point didn't mean I was mentally healed. I sure wasn't giving any evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes I just wanted to ask existential questions too mature for the likes of a five-year-old. Then again, Itachi had gotten away with it and he wasn't that far away in age. Then again, Itachi was also a genius and I was just a misplaced adult-ish spirit who had probably taken the wrong exit on her way to purgatory.

Thoughts of purgatory brought back memories of religion, something I had forgotten about in my years here. And with it came flooding the existential questions of  _that_  realm. So strong was that tide that Uchi Naru backed out, forcing me to deal with it personally.

"Otou-san," I started one day, a pot of soup on the fire.

"Yes?"

"Why am I here?"

"Where else would you be? If you were somewhere else, that place would be "here" to you there."

I groaned as he grinned. Shinobi should not be allowed to make such terrible dad jokes. Even if they were philosophical, and especially if said philosophy was convoluted and stupid. What was shinobi philosophy anyway?

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

That sobered him a little. "Where else would you be?" he asked. "If someone else were you, they might be in the same place. Fate put you here with Naomi and I. I'm doing my best to equip you for life but you have to walk the path yourself."

"Towards what though? Where is the path going? What should I do when I get there?"

"Oh Kizuna, it's not a real path-"

"I know that." I stared at the ground. "Just… why did fate put me  _here?_  What am I supposed to do  _here?_  What am I even doing here? I'm a child but I'm not having a childhood, whatever that looks like in this world. What have I given that up for?"

"I can't answer that," he said, face falling and beckoning me closer. "The circumstances you exist in shape what you've been doing, but only you can forge the rest of your life."

I moseyed toward him. "That's an awful lot of responsibility to put on a little kid like me."

"That's why I'm here," he said, wrapping his arms around me. "To give you the tools and guidance to handle it."

I took a deep breath and sank into his embrace, taking back the ground I had lost with my self-expression. Maybe I could handle being here and everything that entailed. "Thanks, Tou-san."


	7. Chapter 7

"Kizuna, I think you're ready to be on your own."

"What?"

It was a few weeks, maybe a month, and a much less eventful flight-for-our-lives after the one where I had physically wrecked and been emotionally wrecked. Bunshirou was now kneeling down in front of me so we were eye-to-eye and had delivered his news with something like a smile on his freshly-shaven face, like this should be exciting or something. Me being on my own? Was he nuts? No, no, of course he wasn't nuts. If my life partner slash mentor teacher father-ish figure was nuts then where did that leave me?

No, clearly he had his own reasons. And if I stopped overthinking long enough, I might get to hear them.

"You're ready to be on your own," he repeated, unhelpfully.

Or not. My right eye twitched. "Okay?"

He rubbed my shoulders encouragingly, stood back up, and began to walk away like it was over.

It wasn't over. "Tou-san, where are you going?"

"Hmm? To go cut up some potatoes."

"No, I mean. Where are you going that I have to be left alone?"

He stopped, turned around and knelt down to face me again. You'd think that after years of being small I'd be used to people kneeling so they could talk to me without me having to crane my neck to see their faces and it wouldn't bother me. You'd be wrong.

"I'm looking for a job, just something I can do regularly during the day so I don't have to leave you alone all the time. But you're six now-"

My eyebrows shot straight up. When did that happen? When did I turn six? The days of training ran together as we lived away from society, with only the brief intermissions of chaos and terror and subsequent recuperation to remind me that I wasn't living in  _Groundhog Day_ , and even then I wasn't convinced I wasn't living in some kind of Groundhog Week or Month. It wasn't like I had a wall calendar. I barely had paper and ink to practice my kanji.

Plus, since when were six-year-olds allowed to fend for themselves?

Oh. My baby boomer mother had at six years old been thrown outside to play and come back by dinner in an age where child kidnappings were more common and far less reported on the news than the age in which I had grown up. Her two-year-old sister was often forced to tag along, and one time she beat up another six-year-old for being annoying.

If a two-year-old could fend for herself, what was stopping me?

"-and I know you can defend yourself-"

I had, in retrospect, realized that the shinobi I had fought most recently were likely genin level - they hadn't actually given me too much of a fight, and the war had dragged on for so long that I was seeing fewer and fewer full-grown adult shinobi in the battles. I didn't know how else I could've beat two of them at my size and skill. Moreover I had hesitated to kill the Konoha-nin who was still trying to kill me in his dying moments when it shouldn't have been a question since letting him kill me would have been akin to suicide. I wasn't sure that I would have qualified me as Capable of Defending Myself™.

"-and I'll be back when I can to keep training you-"

Well at least there was that. I had maybe two jutsu I could use, both without requiring a handsign (one was a simple genjutsu). I knew exactly four official handsigns, all of which I had carried over from Before, but without knowing any jutsu, three of them were useless. The only one I could use was the one everyone knew that accelerated the process of building up chakra. And I knew the handsign for shadow clones but I hadn't been trained in using it so that was useless unless I wanted to risk chakra depletion. (Then again, Itachi had managed a clone at my age, so maybe I could do it too.)

"-and then maybe we can go buy some clothes that fit you-"

That would be nice, especially since all my clothes had had to be modified so now there was far too much open skin than was healthy for winter. And yet sewing equipment was still cheaper than actual clothing. What was with the markets here? Or was it just America that was like that?

"-and, if I make enough, we can start buying more food in the village instead of hunting all the time."

"Food?"

After nearly two years of food being primarily for sustenance, I had learned to be simultaneously open minded about what we ate based on availability and also scrutinous because nutrition was extremely important. With all the meat that was on the menu, I was probably going to end up with some pretty severe atherosclerosis, but on the other hand it had been a better source of fuel than whatever I was eating before in Yuki no Kuni.

My inner glutton eventually won out, though, and I had to resist doing a happy dance. I was sick and tired of pot roast and spit-roast and jerky and stew with the only interesting flavorings (not that organ meat didn't have an  _interesting_  flavor) coming from whatever strange plants we added in a gamble that they wouldn't kill us, and the occasional feast of potatoes (not even gnocchi, which made me sad, but wheat flour was expensive and eggs were rare) whenever they were in season and on sale on the few days we went into the village for supplies. I was so ready for curry and ramen and sushi and mochi to reenter my life for real and not just in my crazy vivid food dreams.

"You like that, don't you?" said Bunshirou, smiling.

My face immediately fell. "Why'd you have to do that?"

Bunshirou's face also fell. "Do what?"

My face turned the color of my hair, if the heat I felt from it was any indication, and I had to look away. My adult was showing. "Nevermind."

Bunshirou stared for a few seconds, then got up and went back to whatever he was doing. Potatoes, I think. I picked at the loose threads in the lower hem of my shirt. Then another question hit me.

"What took you so long?"

"Hm?"

"More like… what made you decide now was the time to go get a job? I mean..." There were plenty of opportunities for him to go. Sensory training. Iron palm training. Tree-walking. Literally any training I did on my own and didn't require a partner. That one day he had managed to sneak away to go into town and buy me mochi for my birthday. Heck, he could've brought me into town so I could wander the streets while he worked. Didn't Yugakure have a training program for their shinobi? Why not put me there? All these things crossed my mind, but my tongue would not move to articulate them.

He regarded my question with an upward tilt of his head, his back to me as he sharpened his kunai. "It's just as I said. You've proven you can defend yourself, even if you're still reluctant to kill. If I had left you alone before, you could've been attacked and killed. Now you have a fighting chance."

"So I could be attacked and live," I finished for him.

"You're six," he repeated, raising his head again to think. "It might seem silly, but looking back, I don't think I expected you to have progressed this far in such short time. Yet here you are."

"Are you saying I'm some kind of genius?"

"No," he replied, lowering his head to focus on his weapons again. "Just that I didn't expect life to force you to advance so far in this."

"Good, because I don't think I could handle being a genius."

I sincerely believed that. The last thing I needed was for people to associate me with the level of prodigy and genius attributed to the great shinobi like Kakashi or Itachi or Minato or anyone in the Nara clan. I just needed to be good enough that nobody would challenge me, but without the fame that would have people recognizing me and sending bounty hunters after me. Then I realized the only way to remain unchallenged was to be famous enough that people would know not to challenge me as soon as they saw me; otherwise they'd mistake me for a mook, a pest to get out of the way. I'd have to reevaluate my training goals and controlling my public image. Not that I had a method of controlling my public image as it was.  _I should get on that_.

"I don't think it'd be so bad," he mused.

"You were a genius," I pointed out. "And your clan hated you for it."

"Do you think I hate you?"

"No."  _I think you love me very much. And I… appreciate you._  My skin tingled uncomfortably, as if my sweat glands were waking up in anticipation of being used.

"Do you want to have freedom in your life?"

"Yes…?"

"And you realize that freedom isn't free."

"Of course."

"So to work I go, and you go on being a genius of hard work, and one day we might both be free."

He turned around, the conversation over, and went back to whatever he was doing.

Genius of hard work? No. Just no. I had zero business being compared to Naruto or Rock Lee, both of them established highly effective kinesthetic achievers. I had been lazy in the before, and given the chance I'm sure I would've been in this life too. My tactical abilities were untested, untrained, and probably subpar. While most of my training was taijutsu-based at this point, I had no desire to be a taijutsu master. And I think I've shown that I did not have the sheer enthusiasm and will power of the two, nevermind the huge emotional intelligence they sported.

My only motivation to train anything at all nowadays was to mitigate the threat of imminent death that came from living within a war zone, and even then… was it worth it?

What was it even worth, anyway?

...I guess there was still food.

What? You were expecting something sentimental?

* * *

Months passed. Bunshirou left in the mornings and came back after dark, exhausted and ready for dinner and always demanding to see what I, sleepy because the sun had been down for an hour or so by then, had done that day.

He brought me embezzled paper from where he worked, an onsen with a name in kanji I didn't recognize and a pronunciation I didn't bother to remember. They also had pens. Like actual pens and not just calligraphy brushes. I had to laugh at the technological disparity, that a world ruled by ancient notions of feudalistic and militaristic societies where metal tools were considered one's best weapon also had the plastic and the manufacturing facilities to create a ballpoint pen. Then again, Yuki no Kuni had been fairly industrialized when I still lived there.

Giving me the paper and pen was a mistake, at least initially, because all I wanted to do with them was doodle all day. And I did a couple of times. I spent far too much time doodling.

Bunshirou commented derisively one day that my triceps were no longer rock hard, so I switched to doing what I did best: doodling and doing whatever until sundown, with the occasional break to check the traps, and then putting the meat on the fire and pouring an entire day's worth of training into an hour and regretting it the next day due to soreness from overexertion. So I improved, but I think Bunshirou was still disappointed.

Eventually I admitted to him that I was bored.

He tore me a new one. It was just like fifth grade, only physical because he was my father and not a teacher who would definitely get sued if she laid a hand on me ever. I definitely deserved it though - I knew I had things to do and I knowingly did not do them. And I tried to ignore the voice of Uchi Naru as she continually reminded me that, had I any integrity with keeping my word and bothered to practice the things, I could be learning new, more interesting things. Because I was a  _prodigy_ , remember? And even prodigies had to practice.

That was when the pen and paper were finally put to good use: writing. Specifically writing what I had done that day. I still didn't know a lot of kanji but I had finally picked up enough spoken Japanese that I could piece it together in hiragana. Because no way was I going to explain romaji and English to him. Or any other language I had half-known in the Before.

And… I guess I sort of got back on track?

I had hit a plateau in my training. It was less than gratifying to see the numbers stay more or less the same for the first week. Then Bunshirou offered me some alternative exercises and I began to see progress again.

He promised to bring me into town soon.

* * *

The forest was quiet and Disney-esque as Bunshirou and I approached the village gates. The skies were gray, composed mainly of big and tall fluffy clouds with flat bottoms, sinking and threatening to dump the first winter snow on the land. They had been threatening this for several days now, and to my relief (and probably also the tourists' relief) they had not made good on it yet. My long-accumulated immunity to cold had been slowly wearing away with the temperate weather Yu no Kuni had during the rest of the year, and I didn't have a winter haori that fit me yet.

That was one of the objectives, actually. New and oversized clothes I could grow into over the winter plus a cushy haori for the days when the wind, normally calm and light, was for a change relentless in its assault on my skin.

Tou-san had been given one day off from work, a desk job slash bouncer at one of the larger hot springs in the village, I learned. He was using it to clothe me. He was working very hard and I was grateful to him for it, even if the previous months' laziness suggested otherwise.

We stepped through the gates and the sight of people whispering in groups caught his attention. Normally they walked around doing their business and generally politely ignoring each other. Even more interesting to me was the variance in attire. Some of the groups included those who wore hitai-ate marked with three diagonal slashes - Yu-nin. A small handful of groups were clad in denim and leather, quite unlike the popular yet comfortable traditional garments the rest of the civilians wore. A few of the Yu-nin regarded us as we passed the groups, but otherwise nobody paid notable attention to us.

I tugged on Bunshirou's haori sleeve as we wove our way through people. "Tou-san, what's happening?" I whispered.

"Listen and learn," he whispered back.

Solid advice. So I did, using my candle training and a thin stream of chakra to expand my senses in hopes of picking up words and not just a sea of gibberish. Closing my eyes would've helped, but I didn't have that luxury since I was, you know, walking around a place that, while not entirely unfamiliar, I couldn't yet navigate with my eyes shut. I made a mental note to address that later.

"-could drive Kumo to agree to such terms?"

"-nothing's official yet, but they say-"

"-course you'd expect this sort of weakness from-"

"-fucking pansies-"

I didn't have to hear the names to figure out that this had to do with the war involving Konoha and Kumo. Agreement? Weakness? Either one side had been severely crushed recently in a battle that we had fortunately not been caught in, or-

"The daimyos will never agree to peace on these terms."

"Nor should they."

The snippets of conversation immediately cut off as Bunshirou pulled me into a small building. Probably for the best, since I was losing touch with reality in favor of eavesdropping and was amazed that I hadn't tripped over my own feet, themselves encased in too-small shinobi sandals (which were, to my relief, the only shoes I ever had that weren't the most uncomfortable things when I outgrew them).

The inside was lined with racks and stacks of clothing, both western and traditional Japanese. I immediately went for a stack of pants, a baggy, light greenish khaki stack drawing my attention, but was steered to the more generic navy blue ones. On one hand that was exciting - those were shinobi-grade pants, appropriate for someone who apparently had shinobi-level combat skills, and they wouldn't stain or tear as easily as something light like khaki. On the other hand, I really liked that khaki. It was one of the few colors that didn't make my salmon-colored hair seem overly saturated, as if I belonged on the Vegas strip.

I was ushered into a dressing room to try on the pants. The goal was to find two pairs with legs long enough to just brush the tops of my feet and baggy enough that they'd fit normally by spring. Because, let's face it, I wasn't getting new clothes again for a year or so unless this set got absolutely destroyed, and even then I was likely to just loosen the strings holding together the clothes I had already outgrown. I had had to cut the side hems off of them, sew in eyelets, and use cheap ribboning to tie the pieces together. Possibly a flattering look for a teenager or twenty-something, but definitely not for a kindergartener, much less a kindergartener future-killer.

I exited the stall, my pants chosen and the rest folded and placed for the shopkeeper to put back on the racks. Immediately my senses tingled.

_They have displeased the gods._

More whispering?

_We shall have to see to it that-_

I shook my head to clear the noise, as well as the rising sense of dread that had inexplicably come with it. There was Bunshirou in the corner, seemingly minding his own business, but something told me he was just as on alert as I was. I silently deposited the chosen pants in his arms and we went to find corresponding tops.

* * *

The noise didn't stop even after paying and exiting the shop. It followed us into the food bazaar, whispers on the edge of hearing and the only distinguishable words relating to  _god_  and  _death_ , and I couldn't help but feel that I should recognize it.

I mean, I didn't need to know  _who_  they were to know they were probably bad news. But the question of their identity did continue to nag at me as I hauled sacks of potatoes and cans of bamboo shoots and a few bags of other vegetables and, yes, a handful of mochi balls through the marketplace.

On the other hand, the voices of other shoppers gave me more information. Though I still couldn't make out anything specific until-

"Oof! Ah, sumimasen." I bowed shallowly, simultaneously twisting out of the way of the woman I had just bumped into (and possibly also being rude because of the nuance of angle of bowing and stuff I didn't know too much about because I so rarely interacted with  _people_ ).

My putting effort into hearing what people were saying was causing me to run into people. Perhaps it was also preventing me from getting what people were saying. I backed off.

Soft eyes, Dad had once told me when I was learning how to drive, were more observant than hard eyes. Almost like using the motion-sensing principles of peripheral vision to navigate the ever-changing landscape of roads and other cars and saving the detail-oriented direct vision for signs and noticing when the yellow line in the middle changed from solid to dashed and vice versa (though that too could be perceived with peripheral vision). Now I was only listening for things on the edge of perception, for that combination of sounds that would alert me to something interesting and to it draw my focused listening.

(If only Japanese weren't so topic-oriented. Even with this new way of listening, I was still likely to lose some key information because the words I was looking for were more likely to be verb phrases that came at the  _end_  of sentences, and after that so many things were implied from the established context and I wasn't a fucking telepath.)

But the words "Kumo" and "peace" did not come up again and I left the village with more questions than answers.

Oh well. Some other time maybe. Bunshirou would probably hear the news at work and maybe tell me later.

* * *

Not much had actually changed about our financial situation since he started working a job. We were able to add more vegetables and udon to our wild meat stews, and there was that one clothes shopping trip. And Bunshirou began outfitting me with my own weapons pouches.

I patted the shuriken holster now strapped around my left thigh, kept from sliding down my new pants by the sticky bandages wrapped around it. (That was something I had wondered once, how thigh holsters could be flush against the fabric of the pantsleg no matter how loose or tight the pants themselves were.) It felt heavy and foreign. I wanted one for my other leg too, to balance things, but Bunshirou had said no. I guess that was fine. I still needed to learn how to  _throw_  shuriken anyway.

"Come here," Bunshirou said. I turned around to see him unfurling a scroll with some fancy squiggles inside and I resisted the urge to flap and squee with excitement. It was tradition, it seemed, for an OC to learn and master fuinjutsu - Shikako and Kasa had done it, after all, as had a number of other rip-off OCs. I jogged toward the display, ready for this rite of passage.

"There's a trick not many people know," he said, the corner of his lip twitching upward in amusement. He took all but one of the cans of bamboo shoots and stacked them on the blank spot in the center of the formation. Then he outright grinned as he built up chakra, accompanied by the expected low whirring, and channeled it into the paper, into which the stack of cans immediately disappeared with a "poof," the only evidence of them ever being there a kanji where the paper had once been blank and a rapidly dispersing vapor cloud.

It was a basic sealing jutsu just like the one he always used for his cooking materials and change of clothes. How could people not know about that? I stared at him, unimpressed.

It took him a moment before he realized his faux pas. "Oh right, you don't know about that. Normally one cannot seal food in a scroll, but when it's in an airtight container it's perfectly safe."

"Oh," I said. "...Are you really sure that's a little-known trick?"

"Your mother taught me that," he replied, slightly offended, like that should've answered all my questions.

It didn't. "I don't know what that means."

His face fell. "Of course not," he muttered. "Your mother was from a village famous for their fuinjutsu."

My eyes widened marginally. "...Uzushiogakure."

It was Tou-san's turn to look surprised. "Yes. How did you know?"

"Uh," I said, fishing for my usual scapegoat when I knew something about this world that I had no business knowing. Because Kaa-san sure hadn't told me and I had yet to see another person at all with red or pink hair. "Yukigakure no Academy?"

Well that was an unexpected revelation - confirmation that Kaa-san was originally from Uzushiogakure. I added that to my growing mental list of similarities between my situation and Kasa's. What was going to be next? I run into and save a dying Obito and end up preventing Madara from unleashing Kaguya on the world? (Except that was all the way in that country where Kusagakure was, not too far from Amegakure, and we were several nations away. So probably not.)

Tou-san nodded and turned away, taking out his kunai to mark up some of the tree trunks. "Sometime I'll have to take you there. When you're older."

Aside from the snarky comment about  _every second I'm older than I was_  from Uchi Naru, I nodded and took that in stride. It would certainly be  _interesting_  to see Uzushiogakure. It was also my second clue as to where I was in the timeline (the first being that Yuki no Kuni was still Yuki no Kuni and not Haru no Kuni so I wasn't in the Boruto!verse). Uzushio had existed not too long ago. Possibly still existed. Which, if indeed the case, begged the question of what had Hamauzu Naomi leave.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is beyond late. It was three months late coming to FFn and another two here, because I have terrible time management and four classes and physics homework and life getting in the way, and aside from that I am struggling so hard with this arc because all I want to write are the future arcs.
> 
> Chapter 8 is pretty much finished, but with so little to work with for chapter 9, I've been delaying posting it. Hopefully after chapter 9 things will start moving again from the author's (my) end.


	8. Chapter 8

I hissed as I applied a disinfectant to my skin which burned as my immune system forced blood and heat to the deep cuts marking it, flushing out dirt or whatever and trying to scab so nothing could get in there. Now that we had money for such things I didn’t need to rely on Bunshirou’s patchwork medical ninjutsu as much and could use more chakra for actual training. Unfortunately the disinfectant stung like a bitch. At least iryo-ninjutsu had a mild analgesic effect.

In the trees around me, shuriken. About half of them made it to the edges of immaculately carved targets in the trunks. The rest were on the ground at my feet, a few of them bloody from when I hit things at the worst angle and the spinning pinwheels of doom were launched straight back at me, moving far too quickly for me to dodge completely. I was lucky I wasn’t dead. Probably. Or at least severely maimed. Maybe I should have spent more time practicing instead of making the targets perfectly smooth and round and creating games to motivate me to do better only to get distracted by the making of said games.

I couldn’t see Bunshirou’s expression when he came home to me that night, as I nursed the fire that was heating our stew and reflecting off of his glasses in that way animators like to draw when they don’t want you to see that character’s emotions. I could only imagine what must have crossed his mind as he saw me, bloody bandages and in my old, torn clothes despite the winter chill, and making dinner like nothing had happened.

I could see him tense, like he wanted to rush forward and fawn over me and my injuries. And I could see him holding himself back - I was six and I was a Big Girl now, just like Junie B. Jones. And I wasn’t in any immediate danger.

“What happened?” he managed to splutter finally.

“Training accident,” I replied shortly.

“Nothing else happened?”

“No.”

“Oh thank kami-sama,” he heaved in obvious relief.

I turned away from the stew to stare at him. I had been under the impression that Bunshirou did not subscribe to a doctrine of faith and divinity, and he rarely if ever invoked the term “kami-sama.” His “religion” was to restore power and integrity to the Imanara name, whatever that meant. I wasn't sure he'd achieve enlightenment that way, or that he’d achieve that goal by doing what he was doing now, but what did I know about any of that.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Hmm. Nothing spectacular,” he responded, and I didn't believe him.

“...Hear any interesting rumors?” I pried.

Suddenly he was very fascinated with inspecting the cuts underneath my bandages, mostly limited to my arms and shoulders. And the iryo-ninjutsu he was applying to them was definitely welcome.

“I'll take that as a yes,” I said.

“How do you know me so well?” he lamented. “I have grown soft and expressive. I must retrain my face not to make such revealing expressions.”

It wasn't really his face that revealed that to me, but whatever. “You do that,” I said, “after you tell me what you heard.”

“Okay,” he said, easily defeated. “There are peace negotiations being conducted between Hi no Kuni and Kaminari no Kuni. One happening in this area didn't go so well and a fight broke out between the attending shinobi.”

“Tou-san,” I said. “You know they probably didn't do this in the middle of the forest, right? Don't these things usually happen in buildings? And not in scattered parties?”

“Normally yes, but they have separate meetings for the nations and for the shinobi villages. Capital staff do attend the officiated meetings between shinobi villages to try to keep the shinobi from fighting there but that doesn't always work. They are civilians, after all, and there’s usually some backdoor communication happening between the shinobi villages anyway.”

I nodded. “Interesting. Thank you for telling me; this is stuff I should know.”

“Why do you need to know? You're six.”

“Uhm.” That set the hamster wheel spinning. “Because. I. Um. It's. Important? For. Um. Not dying, you know. Definitely not because I want to go join a hidden village when I'm old enough or be in politics.”

I gulped as Bunshirou stared at me, trying to swallow back the suspiciously specific denial and paper thin defense. I had no idea why he tried so hard to protect me from _everything_ in the world around us, especially the less physically violent portions like politics. It was true, I had no desire to be in politics -- I had seen enough of that in my past life to know I didn't want any part in that. Being part of a hidden village, on the other hand, was in line with my desire to not live in the middle of nowhere where the daggers of my mind were aimed at me for lack of anywhere else to aim them. (Fortunately, Uchi Naru had been quiet this month.) Heck, I didn't even care which hidden village at this point. Except Kirigakure. If Karatachi Yagura was still Mizukage then I wanted nothing to do with Kiri.

As far as I knew, politics were what drove us out of the Land of Snow, and possibly what kept us living away from people in general. Just because we weren't directly involved didn't mean they didn't affect us anyway. And wasn't that reason enough to at least be aware of what was happening?

Of course while I had all of these great reasons, my tongue refused to cooperate, still reeling over my poor defense from earlier. Maybe Uchi Naru wasn't so dormant after all.

...Tou-san’s lips were moving. _Shit, I missed his reply._ I’d been so busy thinking that I hadn’t even been passive listening.

I stared at him blankly, back in the present moment.

Tou-san burst out into laughter. “I see you already have the necessary skills for it!”

“For what?” I gaped. “Politics?”

That just set him laughing more.

“But I don’t actually want to be in politics!”

“You have the perfect cover story!”

“I just want to understand it.”

“I don’t think most politicians understand politics.”

I gave up.

* * *

 

The good news about the peace negotiations was that the forest stayed quiet and relatively battle-free, and we got to stay in one place for the entire winter. By the time spring rolled around I began to have hope that we could keep living our peaceful hermit lives despite the glaring inconsistencies it had with the life goals of Imanara Bunshirou.

I was wrong.

No, not because of another battle. It happened a few days before I was supposed to accompany Bunshirou into town to replenish my sewing equipment. Both of my fitting sets of clothes were patchworks of their original selves thanks to endless shuriken training, and I hadn’t grown enough to need an entirely new set just yet. What stung was that I wasn’t getting much better at throwing shuriken, and even though I could see where the shuriken were going I wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. How had I survived any of those battles before? Adrenaline. It had to be.

I heard Bunshirou long before I saw him, which in itself wasn’t unexpected, especially since I was in the middle of candlelight sensory training at the time. That was probably the only thing about it that wasn’t unusual. It was just past high noon, and the gap between hearing him and seeing him was much longer than usual, which meant either he was moving slowly or he wasn’t masking. Either could have been for any of a number of reasons, and I didn’t like any of those reasons.

When he did finally appear, he was shaken but not stirred, eyes scary and temper flaring. I silently compared my injuries to his as he sealed away our camp and demanded that I follow him and keep up.

When we got to our new destination, after the silencing perimeter seals went up, he went on a blue streak.

“Pointless! Everything is so pointless!”

“That’s my line,” I muttered under my breath. I wondered if the eternal boredom that accompanied living in the forest all by ourselves was finally getting to him like it had broken me a long time ago, but he was bordering on Kaa-san levels of stark-raving mad while I had surrendered my feelings to the matter.

“No matter what I do there’s no way I can protect you _and_ provide.”

Okay, I could work with that. “What happened?” I asked. “Did they cut your pay?” They had been threatening that ever since he got the job on the principle that Bunshirou was a foreigner to Yu no Kuni. But they hadn’t been able to backfill the position due to the war.

“Not yet,” he replied, seething and barely able to force the words through his clenched teeth. “Thanks to the peace efforts, tourism is up and Yu-nin are returning home.”

“Um. Okay?” That last bit was a slight surprise. The Yu-nin were neutral in the conflict between Konoha and Kumo, so aside from making sure skirmishes didn’t erupt in the civilian resorts, I had not thought that they’d be involved in the war at all.

“It’s the cultists,” he continued. “You probably don’t know what those are. Let’s just say they’re trying to really screw things up.”

I knew what cultists were. I’d seen enough shows on crime networks my dad had become so fascinated with (out of boredom with everything else on cable television) in the last years of my old life that I could’ve rattled off a handful of facts about the scarier ones if I thought I remembered them correctly and if I didn’t think Bunshirou wouldn’t have me hauled off to a mental hospital for knowing those kinds of things without having once heard about them in this life. And there was something that told me that I knew something about these cultists too. Only I couldn’t figure out what.

It almost sounded like a cheap plot device to me, the fact that I couldn’t remember anything about _these_ cultists. But if it made my life even a fraction more interesting, I’d take it.

“That doesn’t tell me anything,” I said finally.

“They’re violent. They’re making it really hard for the company to operate because the company supports the upcoming peace. And I just found out today that they’re crawling all over the countryside looking for victims.”

“Oh. I get it now.”

“And I know you can defend yourself, but these guys are something else. You can’t face them and expect to win. Hell, _I_ can’t face them and expect to win.”

“So let’s train together?” I suggested.

Bunshirou wouldn’t have it. “Why? It’s pointless. If I leave you alone to train you could hurt yourself worse than you already do with the shuriken. If I leave you alone at all they can find you and I couldn’t come help you fight them off. And we can’t move because I can’t quit my job because I can’t afford for us to live otherwise.”

“Tou-san, it’s okay, if we have to go back to hunting every day I can live with that. It hasn’t been that long. And I can patch my clothes with animal skins if we soak them first. I’ve done it before.”

“That’s not it,” he whispered, looking away. I stared and waited, but he made no move to clarify.

Resigned and accepting of the fact that he wasn’t going to expand on his comment to me, I slowly busied myself with finding and digging out the jerky I had managed to pack away before being whisked here. I handed a piece to Tou-san, which he took with a mumbled “thank you” and we ate in silence.

“So,” I said finally. “I’m no good at aiming shuriken.”

“No,” he said, agreeing. “You’re not.”

“But I can throw kunai.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Will you teach me something I can master?”

Bunshirou stared at the last piece of jerky in his hand and heaved a sigh. “Yes.”

* * *

“I will be guiding you through the steps to master the Imanara hiden jutsu.”

“Please instruct me,” I said, bowing, out of respect but also to hide my internal squeeing that finally, _finally_ I was going to learn something useful and that which the Imanara clan had held and protected as their own for as long as they had existed.

“We will begin with the achievements of our ancestor, Nara Masayoshi.”

“Nara?!” I exclaimed, breaking form in my bow.

“Yes,” Bunshirou said. “This is important. Listen.”

“Hai.”

“Nara Masayoshi-sama was unable to fully master the Nara hiden jutsu. What he was able to master is a foundation in what would become the Imanara hiden jutsu. What the Nara do is manipulate shadows and through them manipulate people’s bodies. Nobody knew why Masayoshi-sama was never able to manipulate the shadows, but he was able to manipulate the people. Like so.”

He put out his arms, humming almost inaudibly, indicating that I should do the same. I raised my arms in front of me, parallel to the ground. He took my hands, and the humming was suddenly in my ears, louder, and a familiar sensation filled me.

The same sensation that had me learning to walk on water for the first time.

It was chakra. A chakra infusion of sorts, but it bypassed my chakra network and anchored itself into my muscles, all but my face which was left to react. Into areas _around_ my undifferentiated chakra vessels. It flowed strangely inside of me as, without my input, I stepped forward with my right foot, mirroring his step backwards with his left foot in perfect sync, almost as if we were dancing with no lag indicative of one reacting to the other. We took several more steps together before he let go and his chakra flowing through me spilled away without him to keep it in place. I stumbled as I was shoved back into control, managing to regain my balance before I could fall.

Wha… _what was that?!_

I knew what it was. Still, I found my mind blown at the sensations and idea that _that_ was what he was doing to me. (Somewhere in a corner of my mind, I also kicked down the adult in me making that reaction into _something_ it most definitely wasn’t.)

“What I did,” Bunshirou was explaining, “was I infused you with my yin chakra through direct person-to-person contact. And I manipulated my yin chakra inside of you in order to have you mirror my actions.”

For lack of a better expression,

_Damn straight!_

“There are, ahem, a few side effects, and some caveats,” he continued.

_No kidding._

“It requires a strong chakra flow and can only be maintained for a few minutes if the recipient doesn’t resist. It tends to leave people stunned and can leave you stunned as well if the other person is particularly strong. And aside from learning this jutsu, teaching someone physical skills, and in torture sessions which I hope you never get into, it’s absolutely useless.”

And the euphoria died a sad, quiet death. “Oh.”

“And finally, it can’t be used on clones.”

“Not even on shadow clones?”

“How do you know what those are?”

“Yukigakure no Academy.” The lie rolled off my tongue automatically.

Bunshirou stared at me. “Sounds like the education was exemplary, even if the discipline was outrageous. Maybe we should have kept you enrolled there.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I murmured, not really agreeing but also not wanting to continue this vein. “How do I practice?”

“Normally we would start with animals but we need animals for food and it works better if they’re alive, so we’ll have to skip straight to human training.”

“O-okay,” I said.

He held out his hands. I stared at them for a moment, then built up yin chakra into my hands and reached for his.

I didn’t anticipate how difficult it would be to shunt my chakra into a being already full of his own, despite his previous use of chakra and his best efforts to remain compliant, or at least non-resistant.

I didn’t anticipate how mentally exhausting it was and how much I was suddenly looking forward to bed later that night.

I didn’t anticipate how heavy my arms suddenly became, heavier and heavier as I channeled more chakra to override his will and the humming got louder in my ears.

And I didn’t anticipate the wealth of sensory information that came in through the contact. The wear of his hands after a long day’s work and the way his chakra lazily flowed through his hand meridians that I tried so hard to avoid the way he had mine.

Bunshirou shook his head and drew his hands away from mine like it was nothing, and I was thrown back into my own head. “Try again.”

“Not gonna tell me how to make it better?”

“Just jump back in. What you did was fine, but not what we're going for this time. Do something different.”

“Okay.”

This time I focused, ignoring the story of his hand and work and just trying to get into his muscles. And was unceremoniously thrown out again.

“Ugh,” I groaned as I anticipated the headache that would soon onset from straining the chakra flow. “This is harder than I thought. You did it so easily; I thought I could get it.”

“You've only attempted it twice,” he pointed out. It seemed he was also reminding himself somehow.

“How do I even know it's working though? You could just move your hands at the same time as mine by yourself. It's not like I have a Sharingan to notice such a small delay in that.”

“True, I could, but then you wouldn't learn anything.”

“... I'd learn to up my sensory skills I guess.”

“Maybe.”

“How many times can I do this in a day?”

“At your age and ability I'd estimate somewhere between three and five,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll give it another go.”

* * *

 

“Does the hiden jutsu actually have a name? Like… ‘Imanara art: dance with me no jutsu’!”

“No.”

“Well that sucks.”

“You’ve seen what kind of technique it is. Even if calling your attack does help you focus and increase effectiveness, this technique is best executed when the other person _doesn’t_ know about it.”

“Okay I get that, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have a name.”

“How about _you_ name it then when you master it.”

“Hmm. Maybe. Except, we’re descended from the Nara; don’t they suck at naming things? Maybe I shouldn’t be trusted with such an important task.”

“Kizu-chan.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll think of something. Eventually. Maybe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has been ready for a while now. I've been struggling with the upcoming arc, but now that I have a solid outline for it I hope to be back on my monthly updating schedule. This is, of course, also dependent upon real life not getting in the way.


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